


Population: 1

by AvaTaggart



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Nonbinary Pidge | Katie Holt, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-03-25 18:01:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 26,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13840083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvaTaggart/pseuds/AvaTaggart
Summary: When the wormhole malfunctioned, Keith was sent to a livable but uninhabited planet – alone. With the Red Lion’s systems damaged by the fight with Zarkon and no civilization on the planet, Keith is stuck in total isolation until Red can repair herself. All of this is pretty bad.And then the transformation starts.Alternate version of the start of season 2; Galra!Keith fic with a drawn-out, painful transformation because I haven’t seen enough of that. Also a hurt/comfort fic thanks to randumbdaze.





	1. Landing

Keith stumbled into consciousness in the pilot’s seat of the Red Lion, aching and disoriented. His head pounded, and he could already feel bruises forming across his body. The artificial gravity in the cockpit kept Keith securely in the pilot’s seat, but instead of looking out at space or the hangar, the view from the Red Lion was of a strange-colored jungle, at a slight tilt, like Red had just barely caught herself in time to avoid a nose-dive.

Lance would never let him live it down if he found out Keith and Red had landed so poorly. But . . . was he even here to see? Where _was_ he? And where were the others? The comms were entirely, achingly silent.

It came back to him over the course of a few seconds: being thrown from the Castle’s hangar, struggling with the controls damaged in the fight with Zarkon, and ultimately being flung out of the wormhole like dead weight.

Well, that would explain the headache.

Keith reached a hand forward, making contact with his Lion’s controls, not in an effort to move the heavily-damaged ship, but so that he could hear her. Just being near Red was enough to be able to ‘hear’ the Lion’s equivalent of speaking, but Keith found that Red was easier to understand when he had physical contact with her.

“How’re you doing, Red?” he asked.

Red didn’t speak in words, exactly, but she shared pictures and feelings, general ideas that bloomed into Keith’s thoughts like plants growing in timelapse from seeds that Red scattered. She gave Keith the sense of pain for a split second, not enough to really hurt him, showed him broken systems that he assumed were her inner workings. Weapons, mobility, communications – all had been damaged, either in the fight with Zarkon or in the crash that followed.

“Can you fix it?” he asked her, remembering that Coran had mentioned something about the Lions having self-repair mechanisms. Red sent back a feeling of aching slowness – she could do it, but had no delusions about this being a quick fix.

Keith’s head was still back on the Castle, and to be honest, still in the fight with Zarkon, but there was no time for that now. He needed to get his Lion functional again, needed to get in touch with the others. He could dwell on the past once he was on his way back to the safety of the Castle, once the Voltron team was back together and the universe had its defender back.

Red could fix herself, albeit slowly. If she concentrated her focus on one area and devoted extra resources to the task, that one system would be up and running much more quickly than if she tried to give attention to all systems simultaneously.

Once Red could move, they’d be able to escape any trouble they ran into and begin making their way back to the others. Unfortunately, they could be moving away from the Castle and never know it. Once they had weapons, they’d be able to defend themselves—but so far, this world didn’t seem to be hostile. On the other hand, once Keith could contact Allura and let her know where he was, the Castle could collect them, and the Red Lion could be repaired much more quickly with the others’ help in the Castle hangar.

“Focus primarily on communications,” Keith said. “If you have any extra energy left after that, use it to work on restoring mobility, but right now, it’s most important that we get in touch with the others.”

Red sent back a feeling of assent, and a rare bit of exact information.

 _Estimated time to complete repair of communications system: 16 local days_.

“What!” Keith cried. “That long?”

Slight annoyance, and a replay of a few moments of the fight with Zarkon, Red landing hard and jostling her more delicate internal workings. Even though the Red Lion didn’t really have a voice, let alone a tone of voice, Keith could feel a bit of a friendly I-told-you-so in her message.

“Okay,” Keith conceded. “Sorry for the damage, buddy. And sorry for getting upset. This whole situation’s just got me on edge.”

Red sent back a wave of slight unease in agreement. It was always nice when they agreed like this, though the circumstances were terrible. The whole fight with Zarkon, Red had been protesting – not enough to disobey him, but enough that he knew she was not pleased in the slightest with him fighting the Emperor of the Galra Empire without backup. Red was rash, but not suicidal. Keith had been utterly unprepared for Zarkon, who had managed to almost destroy the Red Lion with nothing but a bayard—the Black Paladin’s bayard. Keith had been grossly outmatched, and it hadn’t helped that he’d also been distracted by the suggestion that a Galra Emperor had once been a paladin, and by Zarkon’s suggestion that Keith had _anything_ in common with the Galra. Put all that together, and Keith was surprised he’d come out of the fight as well as he had, that he hadn’t frozen in panic and been struck down entirely.

He shook his head in his attempt to clear his thoughts.

 _Not now,_ he told himself. _Worry about it once you’re back on the Castle._ _Figure out how you’ll make it through the next two weeks first._

“Are the external scanners still working?” Keith asked. “What’s it like outside here?”

There was a pause as Red activated the external scanners and collected data.

A mild feeling filtered in: safety, but neutral, not welcoming and inviting. The feeling reminded Keith of hot air blown out of a dusty radiator: it was fine for keeping you warm, but it was clear that it wasn’t used to doing so. The planet outside wasn’t deadly by a long shot, but there was something fundamentally different about it; different from Earth, from Arus, from every other planet they’d passed. The plants were safe, the weather too, but the feeling was hollow. There was no living being within range of Red’s scanners, no sign of civilization, or even of animal life.

 “So we’re alone out here,” Keith said.

A quick flash of assent from Red.

“Fair enough,” Keith said. “We could have been worse off.” He could handle being alone; he’d done it before, back on Earth, when he lived alone in the desert, only venturing out for an hour or so every week to buy food. The help of some kind of local mechanic to get Red running faster, or someone who could transmit signals to the Castle, would have been nice, but he could make do on his own.

He couldn’t stop his mind from imagining all the ways it could have gone worse: being spit out into a black hole, or Galra territory, or floating aimlessly through empty space. Any of those things could be happening to any of the others right now, and the concern he felt took him by surprise. He’d been bonding with the others, sure, but it had still been a long time since he’d cared about anyone this much.

He forced those thoughts away. He was still unsure when he’d be seeing them again, and he didn’t need those feelings drowning him as he tried to keep it together alone for the next two weeks and some-odd days.

He needed a distraction, desperately.

“Mind opening the hatch?” Keith asked. “I think I’m going to take a look around our new home-away-from-home.”

Red’s jaw opened in compliance, and Keith headed out to the surface of the planet.

The environment here was some kind of jungle, but much cooler in temperature. There were towering trees with thick, peeling pale-blue bark and wide purple leaves that blocked much of the sunlight from reaching the surface. Thick tangles of dark purple bushes with bright yellow accents clustered in spots where the light did reach the ground. Other than the wind occasionally rustling the leaves, there was no movement: no small animals scampering up trees, no birds flying overhead, not even any insects flitting between bushes. Red had been right: it seemed that there wasn’t any animal life on this planet at all.

It was peaceful, he had to give it that. It was almost like Earth, if you ignored the colors. If Keith had been here for some kind of mission, he might even have wanted to stay longer. Now, of course, he was stuck here for a couple weeks, and he couldn’t wait to get off this planet and back to the others.

Keith hoped the days on this planet were short.

Thankfully, the Red Lion was just as correct in the other details of her report, and the atmosphere was breathable. He might be stuck on this planet, but at least he wouldn’t be stuck inside his armor the whole time. He would stay close to Red for now, to avoid getting lost in the probably-endless jungle, but he could stretch his legs, if nothing else. He eagerly took off his helmet and peeled off the gloves of his Paladin suit; the rest was harder to take off, but he was desperate to feel fresh air against his skin after untold hours in the spacesuit.

His stomach growled, and he remembered how long it had been since he’d eaten – hours before the fight with Zarkon, and then however long he’d been passed out on this planet. It seemed this jungle would be good for more than just stretching his legs – after all, Red had said that the plant life was nontoxic, and probably safe to eat in that case.

Keith wasn’t Hunk, didn’t have the other boy’s understanding of what would taste good without needing to eat it first, so as he walked through the jungle, he was left guessing what around him would be edible, let alone tasty. As he waded through the thick foliage, he tried to pick plants that looked kind of similar to plants on Earth, and avoided anything too brightly colored or shiny, remembering from Boy Scouts that those were more likely to be poisonous. He wondered if that held true on this planet, or if plants being poisonous was even a possibility here—after all, why would plants need to evolve to be poisonous when there were no animals around to eat them?

He wound up picking an armful of deep purple leaves that looked kind of like fancy lettuce, a handful of round pale green leaves that resembled pastel spinach, and a few thick roots he’d seen poking out of the soil to bring back to Red. It couldn’t hurt to have Red scan them and double-check that they weren’t poisonous, and besides, the sun was starting to set now and Keith did _not_ want to get lost in the jungle in the dark.

Getting back into the Lion’s cockpit was a relief, like coming back home after a long day of work. Already, the cockpit was familiar, comfortable. Like so few places in Keith’s life, it felt safe. He was glad to at least have this familiarity on the planet, not to mention having Red herself. If he had been stuck here without her . . . well, it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Keith set down the plants he’d gathered on a clear section of the dashboard. He scratched absently at an itchy patch of his wrist, noticing that the skin there was a little discolored, purplish like a bruise. Weird. Maybe one of the plants had given him a rash. If so, he did _not_ want to end up eating it.

“Hey Red, could you scan these plants for me and see if they’re safe to eat?”

There was a second’s pause, and then the sense of peace and warmth filled Keith – Red, letting him know that the plants were safe. He patted the dashboard appreciatively (and he was never entirely certain whether Red could feel him do that or not, but it _felt_ right, and it wasn’t like there was anyone else around to laugh at him doing it anyway).

It felt wrong to sit in the pilot’s seat when he wasn’t actually piloting Red, so instead Keith leaned against the dashboard to eat the plants he’d found. The leaves were bland and fibrous, difficult to chew entirely, and the roots tasted like undercooked potato. They’d probably taste better cooked, but Keith didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

Just over two weeks left of this. He could handle two weeks of bland food and harmless jungle. It was lonely, but it could have turned out far worse. Keith’s mind jumped to lava planets, and subzero ice fields, and a dozen more inhospitable places that he could have landed, that any of the others could have landed.

He hoped the others were okay. If one of them was hurt, or worse—

He didn’t want to think about it. Instead, he focused on the jungle outside, watching as the shadows lengthened as the planet’s sun set.

Two weeks and two days until he’d know if the others were safe. He was safe, he was in no danger, and he couldn’t help the others right now, no matter what he did, so he might as well just go about his business.

This was going to drive him crazy, wasn’t it?


	2. Restless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith explores the jungle and stumbles upon a mystery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo, season 5 was something, huh? Don't worry, no spoilers yet, though I may have a few near the end of the fic. But I'll provide a warning for those in the author's note.  
> I've decided to move updates to Fridays, they're usually a better day for me. From now on I should upload a chapter every Friday.  
> Thanks to everyone who reviewed or left kudos! I'm glad you enjoyed the first chapter :)

Two days later, Keith was lying on the floor and seriously regretting his decision to focus on communications. It was the smart thing to do, he knew, but being stuck on this planet was already making him restless in a way he’d never really been before, with nothing to direct his energy towards.

Back on the Castle, there had been things to do: the others to hang out with, the training room to practice in. Even back in the desert, he’d had a mission he was working towards, clues to piece together. Here, there was nothing but the jungle outside, still and empty. He had Red, but he didn’t want to bother her for company; the more he drew her attention away from fixing the communications system, the longer they’d be stuck here.

He’d already scoped out the area immediately around Red, making sure that nothing hostile was waiting to ambush him, and scoping out likely plants to eat. He hadn’t wanted to go farther, though, scared of getting lost on an alien planet, more alone than he could really fathom.

But there were only so many times he could walk the perimeter of the Red Lion’s landing site, or polish his knife, or scrutinize plants for apparent edibility, and now he found himself with nothing left to do today.

Keith turned over listlessly, laying on his side. He idly scratched at the discolored patch on his wrist. From this angle, he could just barely see out the cockpit window, into the foliage outside. The leaves rustled in a soft breeze.

Well, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

Keith hauled himself off of the floor and hit the button to open the cockpit – it took less of Red’s attention than asking her verbally did. He headed down the ramp and headed into the jungle to take a better look around without the sunset fast approaching.

The jungle wasn’t as dense as the jungles on Earth, at least close to where the Red Lion had landed. The plants grew far enough apart for Keith to easily find footing on this planet’s dark gray dirt, and there was a fairly clear line of sight open between the shorter bushes and the trees that towered overhead. Maybe the Lion had crashed in a pre-existing field, because as Keith walked further out, the ground grew thick with undergrowth, and vines climbed the trees and bushed out. Keith turned back to make sure he could still see Red through all the foliage – there was no way he wanted to get lost out here. Thankfully, Red was easily visible. Most things on this planet seemed to be in cool colors, blues mostly, and Red stood out easily from the jungle by her coloring alone, not to mention that she towered over the treeline.

Other than the color red being pretty rare, there was seemingly infinite variety in the plants in the jungle: they came in a veritable rainbow of colors, purple and blue and yellow, multiple colors spread across most leaves in gradients and stripes and spots. The shapes varied just as wildly. Some were broad, flat leaves like trees on Earth had, but others seemed more like something from a weird dream, spirals and fine hairs and tiny circles smaller than a pencil eraser worming their way into the tiny beams of sunlight that the canopy trees hadn’t soaked up.

But there were no animals, no insects. Nothing climbed the trees, or burrowed in the loose dirt, or flew through the air. Apart from the occasional gentle breeze, the whole planet was entirely still. It was a strange feeling, like Keith was walking through a museum display or a 3D photograph instead of an actual jungle, and it sent a chill up his spine.

There might have been nothing else to do on this planet, but was being out in the jungle really worth it? Keith couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching him, that if he turned around he’d catch a flash of motion as something ducked behind a tree to hide.

Keith had never been a big fan of horror games, and this was feeling more and more like one the longer he stayed out.

But he couldn’t spend two weeks on this planet without leaving the Red Lion, he just couldn’t. He’d have nothing to think about except where the others had ended up, the horrible things they might be going through as Keith just sat around, and that would get to him more surely than any imagined monster could. He just needed something to distract him from that uneasy feeling.

Idly, Keith picked a thick bright blue leaf off a nearby bush and rolled it between his fingers. While he was out here, he might as well pick a few different types of leaves to try eating, right? The purple leaves he’d eaten the day before hadn’t killed him, but they weren’t exactly great to eat. As Keith reached down to pick another leaf, he caught sight of the discolored patch on his wrist and grimaced. He wasn’t sure if it was a rash, or if the deep purple color of the leaves had just rubbed off on his skin, but it was probably better to not eat the same plant again, in case it did the same thing to more of his skin.

And even if none of the plants he picked turned out to be edible, at least it would keep him busy.

With something to do other than walk aimlessly, Keith was finally able to throw himself into a task, more or less turning his brain off as his body moved on autopilot, walking and picking leaves from the plants he passed, plants he hadn’t seen closer to the Red Lion. It was exactly the kind of escape he’d been needing, one that kept him from dwelling on the others, kept him busy and preoccupied.

Of course, being so focused on the plants meant that he didn’t notice the box until he ran into it – literally.

 Keith jerked in surprise and pain when he banged his knee into something more solid than any tree stump or plant, and looked down to see something sitting on the forest floor, covered in plants that made it blend in with the jungle, but not itself a plant. He reached forward and pulled a handful of vines off of its surface. They came away easily, their roots unable to find any part of the surface to grip, and Keith found a smooth stretch of smooth grey alien metal beneath them. Pulling away a few more plants, Keith uncovered the whole thing: a modest-sized box that seemed to be an alien storage container, a cube about a foot and a half in each direction with a seam on one side.

So far, there had been no indication that this planet had any animal or insect life, let alone any intelligent life. But hey, this was space, and Keith had seen a dozen or more “impossible” things in space already. Maybe there were sentient plants here, or the planet’s original inhabitants had moved on.

Or maybe, someone else had crashed here like he had.

Judging by the plants growing around the container, it had been here for years. What had happened? Who had left this here, and never come back for it?

Slowly, Keith reached his right hand forward, towards the seam in the box. Any clues on the outside had disappeared over the years, but the inside might be a different story.

Surprisingly, when he first made contact with the metal next to the seam, it slid open, its contents sliding out onto the forest floor, sparkling with reflected sunlight. Keith did a double take. Were those . . . granola bars?

Whatever the items were, they were kept in vacuum-sealed silver foil, not marked or labeled in any way. What was actually inside, Keith had no clue, but he was interested in finding out. He pushed most of the loose packets back into the box and flipped the box so the seam was facing up, then put the rest of the packets back in. While he was at it, he tossed in the leaves he had gathered already—the Paladin armor didn’t exactly have any handy pockets. Touching the top of the box closed the top again, and quiznack if that wasn’t advanced tech for just a storage box.

The box was also surprisingly light, once Keith managed to get a grip on it. The metal sides must have been pretty thin, because while it definitely had some heavy contents and sturdy construction, Keith had little trouble lifting it.

For a moment, Keith thought twice about taking the box, in case whoever had left it would come back for it, but it had been so covered in vines, left here for so long, that he doubted anyone was seriously missing it, if they were even still on the planet.

The ramp to the cockpit was still open when Keith got back, and for a moment Keith was irrationally worried that whoever had left the box might have found their way in and been waiting to ambush him, but the cockpit was thankfully empty. Keith set the box down on the floor, knocking a bit of loose dirt from its surface onto the floor.

“Hey Red, think you could scan this for me?” he asked, and waited a moment for her response. In return, he got the sense of _food, safe._

Keith reopened the box and pulled out one of the foil packets. Seemed like his initial guess of a granola bar had been more or less correct, if this stuff was some kind of alien food. He pulled open one end of the package to find a solid reddish-brownish bar inside. It looked a bit like fruit leather, almost, though it was much thicker, and smelled more like sun-baked pavement than any kind of fruit Keith knew.

Well, if Red said it was safe, that was good enough for Keith. At the very least, it was sure to taste different from the local leaves. He carefully peeled the plain foil wrapper back further and took a bite.

The bar had a texture like fudge, chewy and dense, but the taste was savory, not sweet. Keith had never tasted anything quite like it before—it _was_ alien, after all—but if he had to pick a way to describe it, it tasted like smoke from a woodstove smelled. To be honest, Keith had been expecting something on par with the green goo the Castle made, vaguely acidic and with little other flavor. Whoever the aliens were that made these bars, they certainly had a sense of taste more in line with humans, and Keith ate the rest of the bar without really thinking about whether or not he should.

Now he was _really_ curious about who had left the box, who had been here before him. Had they found their way off the planet, or were they still here? Where had they come from? While thinking, Keith scratched idly at the patch of purple skin on his wrist, which was beginning to itch again.

Of course, there was only one way to find out more about who had left the bars, and that was to go looking for the answers.


	3. The Itch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith's rash gets worse. The stakes get higher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update, I totally forgot to post this yesterday! Hope it's worth the wait :)

It started with his wrist. Overnight, the itch there went from negligible to unbearable, burning its way through the patch of discolored skin and dyeing it solidly lavender by the time it subsided to the tender rawness of new skin as the planet’s sun started to rise. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it started to spread.

At first it was just blossoming out from the patch on his wrist, which Keith could at least make sense of. But the next afternoon, he could feel the itch spattered across his forearm, seemingly speckled at random.

Keith had taken off the outer plate armor of the Paladin’s suit already, figuring no one would be able to attack him in the Red Lion anyway, and pulled up the sleeves of the undersuit shortly after, both to track the spread of whatever this was and to make it easier to scratch at the affected areas. It was a bad idea to irritate the skin when it might be a foreign contaminant irritating it, but Keith didn’t have many other options, and the itch was absolutely maddening.

Besides, the Red Lion seemed dead-set on the idea that this wasn’t caused by something on the planet at all. Keith had made her scan everything he’d come into contact with again, and she still insisted everything he’d touched was not only safe to touch but edible. Which, unless her scanners were malfunctioning, meant that Keith could rule out this being an allergic reaction, rash, or infection.

That didn’t leave him with many options.

It could be some kind of negative reaction from the fight with Zarkon—after all, his druids had done something similar to Keith once, when he infiltrated the supply station, momentarily mottling his hand purple, though that hadn’t come with the same itch that made Keith want to tear his skin off, and it hadn’t spread like this.

The other possibility, that it was something wrong with _him_ that was causing this, wasn’t worth thinking about. After all, nothing like this had ever happened before, to him specifically or to any other human he’d ever heard of. This wasn’t a _thing_ that happened to people. Humans didn’t change colors, unless you counted vitiligo, but that involved losing the pigments in your skin, not getting new pigments, let alone turning a color that humans didn’t even come in.

So if it was something about Keith causing this, what did that say about him?

He was trying not to think about the answer to that. He just had to wait it out on this planet while Red fixed herself, and then he’d get back to the others, and Allura and Coran would know what this was and how to fix it. Heck, maybe it was even some kind of weird Altean chicken pox he’d gotten from them. No matter what it was, though, sitting around and trying to figure it out wasn’t helping anything.

So instead, Keith tried to distract himself from it entirely by trying to figure out where the mysterious box had come from. At first glance, it seemed to have materialized from thin air in that spot, but when Keith pulled back the vines on the nearby trees, he’d found deep gashes in the trunks and thicker branches, like the box had crashed to the ground at high speed, probably dropped by a ship flying overhead. Or at least, that was Keith’s best guess for what had happened to it. There were no signs of anything suspicious at ground level around where the box had been, to suggest that it might have been left by people travelling on foot.

No matter how the box had ended up where it did, it was proving nearly impossible to track down whoever had left it. He’d spent a few days trying to determine where the ship might have been heading, but the jungle was so thick he had been having trouble making his way along what he hoped was the right path, and he hadn’t found anything yet.

Five days of searching, wandering the jungle without a clue if he was headed the right direction or what he was even looking for, all while the purple discoloration pretty much covered his right arm and started creeping up his neck and down his back, and Keith was getting pretty fed up. Five nights of tasty but dwindling alien food bars and bland, tough jungle leaves, and struggling to sleep as his skin crawled and ached and generally rebelled against being part of his body.

He doubted he’d ever find whoever had left the box, but what else did he have to occupy his time? Picking plants and eating them, watching the purple discoloration creep across his skin, thinking of all the danger the other Paladins might be in?

So even with five failed days behind him, on the sixth day, Keith trudged back to the place where he’d found the box, found the barely-visible path he’d made for himself in the forest, and continued on.

He wasn’t sure how long he walked; he’d left his armor and its timekeeping software back at the Red Lion, since he was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to find anything, let alone anything dangerous, and the leaves and vines had a tendency to get caught in the joints of his armor. The armor also kept him from scratching at his arm, which was still unbearably itchy. The sun reached its peak and began to set before anything interesting happened.

Keith almost didn’t see the glint of sunlight off of metal at first, tiny flecks of light smothered in a heap of multicolored leaves. But he was here to scour the forest floor, and stopped a few feet short of . . . whatever it was. There was some kind of oddly-shaped form buried under layers of vines, smaller than the box had been, and differently shaped. Keith cautiously took a step forward, curious to see what this thing was but not eager to accidentally step on it.

As he approached, the shape under the vines stirred. Keith’s heart skipped a beat before he heard the whir of gears straining against the plants that had grown over the metal shell of what had to be a robot of some kind. The robot gave up after a few seconds, and Keith could tell from the strained noises the thing was making that it weak, barely functional.

When it seemed clear that the robot wouldn’t be able to tear free of its bindings on its own, Keith pulled out his knife and carefully cut through the vines with a swift stroke, making a path for it to pull itself free.

It took a moment for the robot to react, struggling its way out of the plant life, and Keith belatedly wondered if cutting it free was a rash move. Then the robot finally burst free, and Keith jumped back, wielding his knife defensively.

 _Definitely a bad idea,_ he decided as what was now clearly a Galra sentry rose from the forest floor.

After a moment of panic and regretting that he’d left his armor with Red, Keith realized that this sentry might not be too much of a threat. It made no move to stand up, and it seemed it had no legs or gun—part of its left arm had even been torn away. As it swiveled to face Keith, he could see that its visor was shattered, and the tangled wiring and blinking lights underneath were exposed.

“Visual scanners offline,” the sentry said in a synthesized, tinny voice. “Switching to secondary scanning protocol.” Keith could hear the whirr and click of machinery pick up from the sentry.

Keith readied his knife, prepared to take the sentry out if it tried to lunge for him. Instead, the sentry held itself ramrod-straight (or as straight as it could, at least) and brought its remaining hand to its chest.

“Awaiting orders,” it said, and Keith found himself checking over his shoulder for a Galra commander the sentry was talking to. But he was as alone on this planet as he’d ever been. Had the sentry somehow mistaken him for a commanding officer or something?

“Quiznacking sensors must be broken,” Keith muttered, trying to reassure himself. The sentry held its position as Keith strode forward and, with one quick stroke, cut through the exposed cables connecting its head to its body. The sentry fell limp, and Keith should have relaxed along with it. After all, it was just a lone, defective sentry, totally deactivated now.

But something about the sentry’s behavior put him on edge. The sentry being here at all wasn’t a good sign, either. Had the Galra been to this planet? Or a Galra-loyal trading ship? Maybe the sentry had belonged to some rebels that were trying to extort secret information from it, like Pidge had done. And was whoever had left it still here?

Finding the ship that dropped the box went from a time-killing distraction to a mission of critical importance. When he found the ship, there was a chance he’d find allies who could get him in touch with his friends. There was an even better chance he’d find someone who wanted him dead.

Keith quickly stood up, holding his knife at the ready, and headed for the Red Lion looming in the distance. He was closer to finding the ship than ever, but there was no way he’d risk going in without his armor, his bayard.

There was no way Keith would let the Galra get to him before his friends did.


	4. Expedition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith makes a discovery. Well, two discoveries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's just move updates to Saturday from now on, I guess.  
> Thanks to everyone who has left kudos or a comment! I'm so glad to know that y'all are liking this!

Keith waited a few days after finding the sentry to finally go after the ship, partially to see if whoever had left it would come after him, and partially to brace himself for the possible fight ahead. If the ship was friendly, he’d have to be the one to negotiate, but even more daunting was the possibility that it wasn’t, and he’d find himself outnumbered and without backup.

 _It can’t be that bad,_ he reassured himself. _Any living Galra would have noticed the Red Lion crashing and come after it right away._ But there was still the possibility of sentries, ones who had been better protected from the elements, and no way to tell how many.

So Keith spent a couple days practicing as best he could under the circumstances, trying to distract himself from whatever was happening to his arm as much as he was trying to prepare.

His right arm was almost entirely purple under the elbow now, and the color was beginning to trace its way down his back and his other arm. The itching had somehow grown more infuriating when it was in parts of his back he couldn’t quite reach, and Keith was almost willing to write off the purple covering his right arm as a fair trade-off for an end to the itching. He _really_ hoped that Allura and Coran would know some way of dealing with this, because otherwise he might just try to peel his skin off to get away from the discomfort.

It didn’t help that the rash, or whatever it was, had also apparently reached his ears now, and it was messing with them even more than it was messing with his skin. His right ear had been ringing for hours now, and his left was giving him the crackly static noises that the right had before the ringing started, so he was in for a fun however-many-hours-until-this-ended. A distraction might be just what he needed to keep himself sane until his hearing went back to normal, and it wasn’t like he’d need to hear very well to kick sentry ass.

Keith put on his paladin armor, made sure he had his bayard and his knife both within easy reach, and set out into the jungle, back to the place where he’d found the sentry.

He was on edge as he walked past the still-broken robot, setting his course to the direction the ship that dropped the box and the sentry must have been heading. He spent what must have been a half hour jumping at nothing, and cut at least a dozen plants that had startled him by blowing with the wind in half with his bayard. Finally, his nerves settled, and he continued searching with a more keen and less jumpy eye.

The ship was only partially visible beneath the vines and plants crawling up its surface. The top of the ship, still uncovered, seemed to be rising from a mound of plants, and something about the dark metal, about the crumpled but still dangerous-looking fins, was eerily familiar.

Galra, then. This was a Galra ship.

Keith swiftly drew his bayard, holding the sword in front of him and pressing his back to a large tree, ready for an attack. If sentries were going to pour out of the ship, he’d be ready. But none came.

Keith walked closer to the ship, still keeping a careful grip on his bayard. The less distance there was between him and the ship, the worse the ship looked—dents in the metal, the hull streaked with dirt, plants growing through small holes in the ship. It didn’t seem like anyone on the ship was still kicking, or at least in any shape to maintain the ship, and if they couldn’t do that, Keith felt a bit better about his odds in a fight.

But _still_. If there were Galra, or even sentries, left on the planet, they were a threat. Keith would have to be careful, would have to have his guard up. He needed to know if that was the case.

After a few laps around the ship, Keith found what was probably the door—at least, it was a door-shaped seam in the metal, with a control panel next to it, still glowing faintly purple. Keith eyed it distrustfully, not wanting to touch it for a number of reasons. Instead, he picked up a chunk of rotting wood from a stump and tried to activate the control panel by throwing the wood at it. It didn’t work, of course. Keith had known it wouldn’t. But still, he had to try something, anything, other than the one thing most likely to work.

Because if he touched his hand to the Galra-sensitive control panel and the door opened, what did that say about him?

Sure, he’d activated Galra tech before, on the Balmera, but that had turned out to be a trap; the Galra had probably set the control panel there to be accessible to anyone. This one, though . . .

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Keith muttered. He grit his teeth and slammed his right hand onto the control panel. There was a moment of silence where nothing happened, and Keith felt almost relieved.

But then the panel beeped and the door whirred open.

Keith stared helplessly at the interior of the ship, dimply lit in muted purple. It had worked. The Galra control panel had opened for him. But he wasn’t a Galra! He couldn’t be!

Except . . .

Except the purple coloring was spreading across his skin faster than any rash, settling into his skin far past the surface, like it belonged there.

Except he’d been able to work the Galra tech, both the door and the box the food bars were in, no problem. The only way any of the others had been able to do that was with Shiro’s Galra arm.

Except that the Galra sentry, using its scanners, had found him Galra enough to take orders from.

Except that he’d eaten the food bars, made specifically for Galra tastes, and liked them.

Except for the fact that the ringing in his right ear had just stopped, and when he brought a hand to it, he could hear the crumpling of the fabric of his shirt louder than he’d thought possible, and when his hand made contact, he could feel the tip of his ear beginning to extend out to a point.

No, this had been no alien disease. Keith had known that all along, but still hoped that this was something wrong with the outside world, not something wrong with him.

But no. This was all him. Somehow, Keith was becoming Galra.


	5. Change of Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith explores the crashed ship, and comes up with a new plan.

Keith managed to push past the bile in his throat and enter the crashed ship. No matter how much he wanted to run in the opposite direction, to distance himself from everything Galra, he couldn’t. For one thing, he needed to know if he had to be worried about a surprise attack from any surviving soldiers left on the planet.

For another, it seemed that he was Galra himself.

The ship was dark inside, purple emergency lights emitting a glow so dim Keith almost couldn’t tell they were on at first. And yet, he wasn’t having as much trouble seeing as he would have expected, even as he navigated away from the open door and the sunlight it let in. There were no windows, and the emergency lights were negligible. Keith should have been fumbling around in here, as good as blind.

Instead, he was still able to see the walls, the floor, to know where he’d have to step over debris on the floor. It was washed out and gray aside from the faint purple of the lights, but he was having no trouble seeing what no human should have been able to.

And that’s why what should have been a blessing was a curse. He wasn’t tripping over shit in the dark, but it was only because he wasn’t human. Right now, Keith would have given almost anything to be catching his feet on scattered debris in pitch blackness.

The ship was small, thankfully. Keith reached the cockpit quickly. There, in the dim light from the windshield, he could make out a Galra drone robot collapsed in the passenger seat, its lights dead. He kicked a piece of debris further into the room, and in the increased light he could see what it was—the detached arm of another drone.

Had this whole ship been run by drones? Why would they have been carrying food, then? Were they a supply ship, not a fighter?

Well, if there were only drones on this ship, that could explain why the Galra seemed to have left it alone. Keith wasn’t sure that the Galra Empire wouldn’t write off a pilot, but they certainly wouldn’t care about a few robots enough to send a ship after them. It seemed like he might be safe after all.

Still, while he was here, he should check the rest of the ship. He needed to know for sure if there was anything to be worried about, and after he left this place, there was no way in hell he was ever coming back here.

The ship’s layout was simple enough. The cockpit took up the front third of the ship, and the hallway that Keith had taken to get there connected every room. Right behind the cockpit was what seemed to be a storage room. There were several boxes similar to the box that held the Galra food bars scattered across the floor, and Keith was torn between opening them up to see what was inside and throwing up at the idea of being excited at the prospect of Galra food. There was also a gash in the floor, which the box he found had fallen out through, though now another box was wedged in at such an angle that no other boxes had slipped out. A loose sentry leg, likely from the sentry Keith had found earlier, leaned against the box.

The tear in the hull continued into the final room, the engine room, where there was broken machinery with twigs and branches forced in between the parts. It seemed the ship’s belly had hit a tree that was sturdier than expected, and the engine got destroyed, causing the ship to crash.

There were no signs that someone alive had been inside since the crash. No wrappers from eaten food, no footprints in the dust coating the floor. Keith was still as alone on this planet as ever.

He shivered involuntarily. Galra ships were creepy at the best of times, but seeing one like this was even worse, like something out of a horror movie. Even though he knew nothing was alive in here, even though he’d checked every inch of the ship, he still half-expected something to pop out into his face, and got so tense that he jumped when he heard a few leaves rustle against the hull of the ship in the wind.

There was no reason to stay there, anyway, so Keith booked it to the entrance. The light of the sky outside, even now that the sun was beginning to set, seemed blinding after the darkness of the inside of the ship, and Keith waited a few moments to let his eyes adjust before stepping outside entirely. He considered walking off without looking back, but on second thought turned and pressed his hand to the scanner, closing the door to the Galra ship. Better to let the forest swallow it whole, and leave no trace, than to leave it open and inviting for the next person stranded here.

That handled, Keith found himself more unsure of what to do next than he had been since he was kicked out of the Garrison. The mystery of this planet had been solved. He’d explored what was probably the only foreign thing on this planet. He’d even figured out what was going on with himself.

And that was the problem.

Before, the plan had been simple enough: he’d wait it out on this planet until Red got communications online and made contact with the Castle. Allura and the others would come pick him up, and she’d know some weird alien medicine to fix his skin, and everything would go back to normal.

But now. . .

Now Keith was a Galra, or becoming one, and with no sign of stopping. He couldn’t go back to the others like this! They fought the Galra, they couldn’t have one on their side, and they would never be able to trust him enough to form Voltron again. He might as well just stay here. At least here he couldn’t hurt anyone.

The sun was dipping below the horizon now, throwing the forest into deep shadow. Before, Keith might have hurried to make it back to Red before he was left in the darkness of night. Now, though, he could still see, as easily as he’d been able to earlier, when he made his way here.

He hated it.

It was possible to ignore the purple skin, at least. If he managed to distract himself, to avoid making any stray glances at his arms or his reflection, then he could pretend his skin was the same color it had always been. Even the itching was something humans experienced, at times—he could pretend it was poison ivy, or a healing sunburn. But now, his eyes, his ears, they were flooding him with sensory input he’d never had before, and it was a constant reminder of what he was becoming.

Not a human. A Galra.

Could he even go back to Red, like this, knowing that he was turning into the enemy? Would she even let him get close? Or would she see him for the Galra he was, and turn what defenses he hadn’t destroyed in the fight with Zarkon against him?

Keith didn’t know, and right now, he didn’t want to find out. Right now, he couldn’t handle one more blow, and the thought alone of Red turning against him was enough to make his eyes prickle with the beginnings of tears.

“Don’t you dare cry about this,” he muttered to himself, angrily wiping at his eyes, although there was nothing there yet. “You don’t deserve to.”

And really, if he was a Galra, how much else was he not deserving of? Not of being the Red Paladin, for sure, or of the friendship of the other Paladins, or even of landing here, on this safe planet, when it could and _should_ have been one of the others landing here, and him flung into a black hole or something. Not like any of the others would miss him, once they knew. He’d be lucky if they threw him into a black hole themselves once they found out. The pilot of the Red Lion, a Galra? It was impossible.

After all, look what the last Galra Paladin had done. There was no way any of the others would risk that happening again.

Keith walked far enough that he couldn’t see the ship anymore, then sank down to sit on the ground. There was no way he was going back to Red right now.

Just when things seemed like they were going his way, just when he had people that he considered friends and a place he was beginning to think of as home, he turned out to be one of the most hated aliens in the galaxy. Now everything, _everything_ that he’d gained since leaving Earth was lost to him. Maybe for the moment, the others didn’t care, still considered him a friend, but they didn’t know yet. Keith couldn’t help but think of how the others would react, when they saw him like this. It was too easy to see the others stepping back in fear, their faces contorted with shock, and then disgust. Hunk, Pidge, _Lance_. . . Shiro, who had been tortured by the Galra, would probably never look his way again. And Allura and Coran, whose planet the Galra had destroyed, what would they think of him now?

Keith buried his head in his hands, trying to block out the outside world, flinching when his hand caught one of his newly-pointed ears and it twitched ever-so-slightly away from the sudden contact.

Even if he went back to the Castle, there was no way things would ever be the same between them again. The Red Lion still needed a Paladin, but there was no way Keith would be allowed to continue piloting it. Even if the others somehow didn’t throw him off the ship when they found out, there was no way that the mutual trust needed to form Voltron would survive the revelation that Keith wasn’t human, and without that, he was more of a hindrance than a help.

But Red still needed to get back to the others, to the Castle. No matter how much Keith might prefer to stay here on this planet indefinitely, to let the others forget about him without ever finding out what he was, they needed the Red Lion, and to get that back, they needed Keith. He would need to pass information onto them, to help them find Red, and once they knew he was here, they wouldn’t just let him vanish into the jungle. No, without knowing Keith was Galra, they would search the planet for him if he hid, and he would lose the chance to avoid suspicion.

He would just have to find a way to leave them once they had Red back. They would be able to find a new Paladin, Keith was sure. There were thousands of planets in the galaxy, millions of people that would be willing to fight, that had the temper for the Red Lion, that weren’t Galra. The others would be able to replace him, and Keith could avoid ever having to see their disgust for him with his own eyes.

He’d already been waiting, the whole time he was on this planet. Now he’d just need to wait a little bit longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week I'l be updating Friday, because I'll be at a CodeFest all day Saturday. Wish me luck!


	6. Repairs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith gets some news. It's supposed be good news. It's not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops, went to sunday instead of friday. hope this chapter is worth the wait!

In the morning, Keith found his way back to the Red Lion. He’d spent the rest of the night steeling himself, preparing for what he’d have to do, going over the plan in his head: get the communications systems fixed, get Red back to the others, and ditch out in an escape pod before they could find out what he was now and start hating him for it. They might be upset, and he could understand that - heck, he'd been the one to berate Pidge when they planned to leave the team! Leaving now, when Zarkon had just wiped the floor with them, when they needed to strike back as Voltron more than ever, wasn’t right, but staying was even worse. The others would probably have to get used to each other’s minds again, after this time apart. It wasn’t the worst time to have to get used to a new Paladin.

Keith scratched at an itchy patch of skin on his lower back out of habit. It seemed the purple coloring was avoiding his face for the moment, instead swiftly tracking its way down his torso. It was a small blessing, to keep his face relatively normal for a bit longer. It would make getting back to the Castle without being found out easier, at any rate.

Red opened up her jaw for Keith to walk inside, and he let out a sigh of relief as he entered. He’d been worried that she’d recognize him for what he was and refuse to let him in. After spending a sleepless night in the jungle, the comforting clean tech of the cockpit was very welcome. Red sent him a wave of emotions, a happy welcome mixed with confusion about where he’d been the night before. Keith bit at his lip. Should he tell her what he’d found out, that he was Galra? They were close, they had a strong bond, but if Keith himself was having trouble coming to terms with what he was becoming, how would the Red Lion, who had been held prisoner by the Galra for hundreds of years, react? The Galra may not have been able to mess with Red’s mind the way they did with Shiro’s, but that time in captivity would still have led to some negative associations, and Red was undeniably temperamental. What would he do if he told her, and she shut him out, left him more alone on this planet than he already was? He didn’t doubt she’d be able to send some kind of signal to the Castle on her own once her communications system was back online, but if the others heard from Red and not Keith, they’d get suspicious.

And then, of course, finding the Red Lion without Keith, the others would come looking for him. By the time they found him, the transformation might have gone a lot farther, too far for him to pass as human at all. Keith couldn’t help but imagine the others’ disgust, seeing him as one of the enemy; the cold fear on Shiro’s face, the sneer on Lance’s. That was something he wouldn’t be able to bear. No, the others could never find out, which meant Red couldn’t know, either.

“I’m fine, Red,” he finally said aloud. “I just got distracted by something I found last night and stayed out later than I thought I would.”

Red grumbled in distrust at that, but Keith brushed it off. She was better off not knowing the truth, this time at least.

“How’s the communications system going?” Keith asked, eager to change the topic. There should be around a week left until Red got it running again, if Keith was keeping track of the days correctly.

Instead, in a mental ‘tone’ rich with satisfaction, Red told Keith _two days._

“WHAT?” Keith shouted, and immediately winced at how _angry_ he sounded that the timeline had been moved up. He should be glad to be getting off this boring, abandoned planet, but instead he was dreading going back to the others, terrified of them finding out what he was becoming.

“I thought it was more like six days,” he quickly followed up, and Red sent back a rush of images and explanations, the gist of which was that a vital component Red had thought she’d have to rebuild had turned out to only be knocked loose, not destroyed. Deep in the ship, Keith could hear gears grumbling, as if the Red Lion was _purring_. Keith was fairly certain that if Red was a real cat, she’d be circling his feet and begging for recognition right now.

He did the best he could and patted at Red’s dashboard.

“Great work, Red. Looks like we should be getting back to the others sooner than I thought,” he said, trying to hide how nervous that idea made him. He’d _known_ he would have to go back to the Castle, to see Red safely to the Paladins, but internally he’d almost hoped to just remain in a kind of limbo here forever, without the others finding him, and without having to know what they’d think of him now. Of course that wasn’t any more realistic than the idea that he’d be able to go back to Earth, or back to being one of the Paladins like nothing had changed.

Keith shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Hadn’t he just been worrying about how much more he’d change before he saw the others, how much further this transformation could go? And now he’d be going back to the Castle sooner rather than later, leaving less time for any more startling changes from the transformation. Maybe now he could be in and out, leave the others behind before they even suspected he wasn’t human.

Keith absently patted Red’s dashboard once more and turned to walk back down the ramp. Red protested a bit, but there was no real annoyance behind it.

“Relax, Red, just want to get some fresh air before we’re back to the Castle again,” he told her. “I’ll be sure to come back tonight.”

Red gave a playful grumble and Keith walked back out into the jungle.

He really was getting tired of this planet, but he needed privacy from Red to work things out, to get his head screwed on straight before he had to call the Castle. He’d figured he would have a week to come to terms with being Galra before he’d have to face the others, before he’d have to put on a brave face and play human until he could get away and leave them to find a new Paladin. Now he had two days, which was hardly enough time to do anything, much less accept that he was turning into the enemy.

How did something like this even happen? He’d grown up on Earth, he’d always been human, as far as he could tell, at least—none of this purple skin or seeing in the dark stuff had ever happened before. It hadn’t happened when he’d first had contact with aliens either, not even the Galra. He couldn’t help but remember the way that Galra druid had been able to turn his skin purple, but that was nothing like this, and the quintessence had turned it back to normal. Had he been some kind of sleeper agent, who could stay looking human as long as there was quintessence? And why had that failed here, on this planet that was full of life, even if it was only plants, and not when he was in the desert?

Keith didn’t know. He doubted he’d ever know anything for sure again, now that his own body was betraying him and his world had turned on its head.

He couldn’t help but look at his hands, at the lavender color that had soaked into his skin like it belonged, like it was the skin he’d been born with.

 _But it’s not! It doesn’t belong!_ he wanted to shout, to scream at his own hands, as if that would make the color fade and reveal the familiar color of his actual flesh. _I’m not Galra! I fight them, I can’t be one!_

His hands remained solidly lavender. He could still feel the itch of the coloring creeping further down his torso, and the beginnings of a backache, probably from spending the night in the jungle instead of sleeping in Red. His body seemed all-too-content to keep him firmly in reality with every physical reminder of what was happening to him, as if it wanted to rub it in his face that this wasn’t a dream. Keith sighed, and felt his left ear flick in annoyance, like a cat’s might. No, pretending he was still human wasn’t a possibility anymore, it seemed.

Keith heaved another sigh, this one far shakier than the last. _Don’t cry,_ he told himself in the sternest voice he could muster. He’d lost a lot, these past few weeks—his friends, his humanity. He’d be holding on as tightly as he could to anything he stood a chance of keeping, right now, and that included his composure. As far as any of the others knew, Keith was the same as ever, and he was determined to keep it that way, determined that none of them would suspect something was wrong until Keith was long gone.

None of them would worry. None of them would hate him.

Or at least, that was the plan.


	7. Making Contact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith gets in touch with the rest of Team Voltron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who has commented! I'm so glad that so many people are enjoying this :D

Over the course of the two days before the Red Lion’s communications system was fully repaired, the transformation seemed to be picking up its pace, as if to spite Keith’s plans to at least be able to pass for human when he met back up with the others. The lavender coloring on his skin managed to cover most of his body, leaving only patches on his calves and face human-looking. Thankfully, the purple on Keith’s face stuck to the edges, and he was able to use his hair to cover the worst of it until the rest looked like it could be shadow. There was a tendril of purple beginning to creep up across his right cheek, but it was pale enough to be passed off as a bruise.

He'd gotten used to the purple by now. What was worse was the growth spurt that followed.

Of course Keith had realized that Galra were tall, by human standards. Even the shortest Galra guards had towered over Keith and the others, and Allura had grown at least a foot to pass as a Galra guard.

What Keith hadn’t realized was that this might affect him.

In just two days, Keith had managed to grow what he estimated was about four inches, with no signs of the growth spurt stopping any time soon. He’d broken down and asked Red if she had anything to dull the pain only a few hours in, and even with the painkillers she’d provided, Keith’s bones were all on fire with a steady ache. Compared to that, the itching of the purple across his skin was nothing, and he almost wished to go back to those first few days of the transformation.

There was no going back, though. All Keith could do now was push forward.

And that meant that when he woke up on the third day since finding out he was Galra to the Red Lion’s insistent and excited beeping, letting him know that the communications system had been fully restored, Keith forced himself into the pilot’s seat, in front of the camera, to contact the Castle.

It took a moment for the video feed to open, during which Keith both worried and hoped that Red was wrong and the communications system was still damaged, but after a few seconds of wavering, a holo image of Coran popped up over the Red Lion’s windows.

“Keith!” Coran cried out before Keith could lose his nerve and end the call. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again!”

Keith had to hold himself back from nervously rearranging his hair, knowing it was precariously hiding the deepest of the purple tinge to his face at the moment and that the slightest movement would expose him. Still, he couldn’t help a slight smile at the sight of Coran’s familiar face. He hadn’t realized until now how _lonely_ this planet had been, how much exactly he’d missed being around others. Red was great, but she wasn’t exactly much for conversation, and since Keith wasn’t either, not a lot of talking had gone on for the past two weeks or so.

“It’s good to see you too, Coran,” Keith said, and he knew it was probably one of the only times in this conversation that he wouldn’t have to lie. “Have you made contact with the others yet?”

“We have indeed,” Coran said. “All the others managed to get in touch a bit sooner than you did, and we picked up Shiro yesterday and everyone else before, so we were all getting pretty worried about you.”

“Red’s communications systems got messed up during everything that happened,” Keith said. “Just about all her other systems, too—I’ve been pretty much stuck here since the wormhole.”

“That’s about what happened to the others—that Galra druid’s work must have fried your lions as much as the wormhole,” Coran said, and Keith fought back a flinch at the sneer in his voice at the words ‘ _Galra druid’_. Thankfully, before he had to come up with a response, someone else cut in.

“Is that Keith?” Allura asked from somewhere offscreen, rushing into view from some nearby part of the ship. A huge grin spread across her face when she caught sight of Keith, who couldn’t help but smile again in return.

“Oh, Keith, we were so worried about you!” Allura said. “Are you all right? Where did your Lion end up?”

“I’m fine,” Keith assured her, trying to keep his voice sounding natural despite the lie. “I’ll send you my coordinates now.”

With a nudge at the Red Lion’s dashboard, the Lion collected their precise location in space and beamed it to the Castle, numbers popping up onscreen by the side of the video display. Allura and Coran turned their attention to reading the output, and Keith took the opportunity to scan the background. While Allura and Coran had rushed to the display, none of the Paladins seemed to be waiting in the room with them. Keith bit down on the swell of disappointment that rushed through him at the thought that they hadn’t cared about his safety, hadn’t been waiting for him to make contact. It was better this way, wasn’t it? If they weren’t so attached to him, it would be easier for them to find a new Paladin.

The Alteans finished reading the coordinates and Keith forced himself to stop wondering about the other Paladins. Coran tapped his chin thoughtfully.

“Looks like you’ve wound up in the Nuxfali system,” he said, as if that meant something to Keith. “Not much out there, civilization-wise. Probably for the best, since there was no one there to try turning you over to the Galra.”

“Is it far from where you are?” Keith asked, worried about the others wasting too much time coming to find him when he wasn’t worth it. “I could try to get Red repaired and meet you halfway—“

“It’s not far at all!” Allura said. “We happen to be quite close, actually—we should be there within one of the planet's days.”

“That soon?” Keith asked, his head swimming. He wasn’t ready to be around the others again, or at least he didn’t think he was, and he certainly wasn’t ready to put that to the test.

“Absolutely!” Allura beamed. “Here, I’ll put in the coordinates right now.” She began tapping at some control surface offscreen, and Coran picked up the conversation.

“The others are in the training room, trying to get back into the swing of things; would you like me to go get them so they can say hello?”

“No,” Keith said. “I don’t want to interrupt their training.”

Allura paused in her typing to shoot Coran a look that Keith couldn’t quite make out, but knew wasn’t good.

“Besides, you said I’ll be back at the Castle soon enough,” Keith said. “Might as well just see them in person then, right?”

Allura reluctantly went back to entering coordinates, but Coran didn’t look phased.

“Good thinking, Keith!” he said. “We’ll have you and the Red Lion back at the Castle in no time!”

“Great,” Keith said. “Then I’ll see you soon.”

It was rude to cut out the video feed so suddenly, Keith knew, but he did it anyway. Pretending to be okay, making pleasant small talk with the Alteans, was draining, and besides, another wave of pain was sweeping his bones. How was he ever going to be able to fake it for hours when he got back to the Castle?

“Just another day here,” Keith muttered to himself. There wasn’t anything left to do but wait. Keith had already been waiting for days, almost two weeks now, at first with excitement but by now with dread. He should have felt excited to be going back to the Castle, to the first place in a long time that had felt like a home, to his friends. But none of them would be excited to see him, if they knew what he was. Keith didn’t belong at the Castle anymore, no matter how much he wanted to.

If only he’d been able to make contact with the others sooner, before he knew all this. If only he could have had a happy homecoming of sorts, some more time with the others before this happened and he lost them. But no, that would have been worse still, to have them find out what he was at the same time, to have them turn on him while he was still confused, still trying to make sense of things. At least this way, knowing before they did, he could avoid that particular fallout. By the time the others found out, he’d already be gone, well out of the way of their anger. Maybe, once they saw that he’d known what had to happen and done it himself, they might not look back on their memories of him with quite as much hatred.

He could do this the right way, the way that was best for the others.

_And what was best for him?_

Well, he was Galra. His wellbeing shouldn’t be taken into account, making important decisions like this. The fate of the Paladins of Voltron was far more important than any hurt feelings one Galra might experience, even if that Galra had been a Paladin himself once.

He could still do this much, though. He could still help the others, in the only way he could now: bring them the Lion, make sure the others were okay, and then leave them.

The universe was a bigger place than Keith had ever realized back on Earth. The others would be able to replace him easily, and maybe, just maybe, he’d be able to find somewhere to hide away and watch them defeat the Galra.


	8. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith reunites with Team Voltron, and things are looking up

The others didn’t call when they got there. They didn’t land the Castle, either, as they likely couldn’t find a clearing big enough to hold the ship anywhere near Keith.

Instead, they sent down the Lions.

Keith was caught off guard when the first Lion bumped into Red, jostling him around the cockpit. Keith acted on instinct, one hand going for his bayard while the other pressed against the dash to keep him steady.

But instead of some big unfamiliar hostile alien ship, what he saw outside was another Lion. The Blue Lion, to be specific.

 _Figures_ , Keith thought. _Lance_ would _want to be the first one to everything_.

Blue was opening her mouth to let Lance out, and Keith asked Red to do the same. He guessed it made sense for the others to want to see him in person right away after all this time apart, although he half-wished they didn’t. He nervously pulled at a lock of his bangs, tugging it down to cover more of his face, before reluctantly heading to the surface of the planet.

Lance had gotten there first, and seemed to be looking around at the scenery. Keith took the chance to check around him at what he hadn’t been able to see from inside Red, and saw the Yellow and Green Lions had also ended up on the planet. Not the Black Lion, though—Keith panicked for a second before remembering that Shiro had only just been picked up. It made sense if his Lion needed repairs. Hunk and Pidge were coming out of their Lions as well, and it seemed Shiro and Allura had ridden along with them, with only Coran unaccounted for. Before Keith could decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing, he was surprised by the Blue Paladin.

“Since when are you taller than me?” Lance demanded. “That is just unfair, I get stuck on some crazy brainwashed water planet and you get a freaking growth spurt from space gravity or something?”

“What, you weren’t always this short?” Keith asked, turning to face Lance, a faint smile on his face. He’d never admit it, but he’d missed the back-and-forth between them. “Or maybe you got shorter wherever you were.”

“You wish!” Lance retorted. “What I _did_ get is a kiss from a hot alien mermaid, so maybe I’m the _real_ winner here.”

Oh, so while Keith had been here turning into an alien, Lance had been making out with one? Here Keith had been _worrying_ about the other Paladins, while Lance had been off having a romantic adventure. It didn’t matter, it wasn’t any of his business, but Keith couldn’t help but think about what exactly Lance had been doing.

“Keith? You okay?” Lance asked, waving his hand in Keith’s face. “Kinda zoning out there, buddy.”

“Sorry,” Keith said. “Haven’t exactly had much practice making conversation here.”

“What, you didn’t draw a face on a coconut and start talking to that?”

“What?”

“It’s a classic stranded-on-a-desert-island trope!”

“This isn’t exactly a desert island, you know.”

Lance sighed like Keith had disappointed him in some fundamental way and shook his head melodramatically.

“I swear, you’re almost as bad as Allura and Coran with this stuff.”

“And what ‘stuff’, exactly, are you saying I’m bad at?” Allura asked, having walked over to the Red and Blue Paladins while they were talking. Behind her, Keith could see the other Paladins: Pidge, studying the plants with a close eye, Hunk, who caught Keith’s eye and waved, Shiro, his face giving no emotion away.  

“Keith!” Hunk called, rushing forwards to close the gap and pulling Keith into a hug. Keith bristled as the impact jostled his helmet ever-so-slightly out of place, but tried to hide it. He was sure nothing was showing yet, and if he panicked, he’d only tip the others off faster.

“Hey, Hunk,” Keith said, awkwardly patting Hunk’s back before the Yellow Paladin released him.

“Dude, we were so worried about you!” Hunk said. “I mean, we managed to hear back from everyone else before you, even though Allura and Coran got caught in some kind of weird time loop thing—“

“What?”

“We’ll explain later,” Allura said, resting a hand on Keith’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. “For now, we just want to get you and your Lion back on board the Castle. Was I correct in understanding that Red’s in no condition to fly right now?”

“Yeah, you were,” Keith said. “She got pretty banged up fighting Zarkon, and the crash-landing here didn’t do her any favors either.”

“Then we’ll just have to carry Red back to the Castle,” Shiro said. “Might be a little harder with gravity than it is in space, but between the three other Lions, I’m sure we’ll manage.”

Keith turned his attention directly to Shiro for the first time. The Black Paladin’s face looked stern, and Keith guessed that his time away from the others had been harrowing for him, but he was also happy to see Keith. Relieved, maybe.

“Thanks, Shiro,” Keith said. “Thanks to all of you, actually.”

“Dude, what for?” Lance asked.

“We’re your teammates, Keith. It’s kind of our job to come help you out when you need it,” Pidge said.

“Pidge is right,” Shiro said. “There’s no way we’d leave one of our own behind.”

“Thanks, guys,” Keith said. “I guess I’d been starting to forget that, out here.”

And he had. Away from the others, he’d forgotten how much of a bond there was between them. He’d thought that maybe the distance, the time apart, would weaken it, but it was still as strong as ever. They were the Paladins of Voltron, a team, friends, a family. Keith hadn’t factored that into the plans he’d made here on this lonely planet, but maybe, just maybe, that bond would be able to survive Keith’s transformation. Maybe he’d be able to stay with his family after all.

 “C’mon, let’s get you and your Lion back to the Castle,” Hunk said. “It’ll be good to have you back again.”

“It’ll be good to be back,” Keith said, and he meant it.


	9. Checkov's Box

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith returns to the Castle, and spends some time with the other Paladins.

The trip back to the Castle was uneventful. The other Paladins managed to keep ahold of Red and get her into the Castle hangar for repairs without dropping her, and no one had even commented on Keith’s appearance since Lance’s complaint about his new height. Keith was beginning to think he’d been overreacting back on the planet about how little his friends would want to do with him. It would take some adjustment, of course, but maybe, just maybe, this would all work out.

Back in the Castle, Keith even dared to take his helmet off when the others did. He still made sure his hair was in the right place to cover up most of the discoloration on his face, because he wasn’t ready to explain that just yet, but he was getting the feeling it might not get such a strong reaction from the others as he’d feared.

Now the Paladins, plus Allura and Coran, were all gathered in the hangar together, trying to figure out what exactly needed to be fixed.

“Jeez, Keith, what isn’t broken?” Lance asked as Coran led Hunk and Pidge through a diagnostic checklist of the Red Lion.

“Hey, you try fighting the Galra Empire and then crash-landing and see how much of your Lion makes it out intact,” Keith shot back, but a small smile teased his lips. Everyone else was acting as they always had. His being back hadn’t thrown things out of balance, hadn’t made the others want to cast him out yet. It was nice.

“You know, you didn’t have to fight him one-on-one,” Lance said. “I bet Blue’d have make it out a lot more functional than Red, if I was fighting Zarkon with everyone else instead of rushing in alone to show off.”

“As if you do anything but show off,” Keith joked. “Anyway, I doubt I’ll even have the chance to do that again.”

Lance started mumbling something under his breath, and Keith took another look around the room, drinking in the sight of something other than leaves and bark. Coran was leading Hunk and Pidge into the cockpit and talking about checking the wiring of the control panel to the enraptured Green and Yellow Paladins. Shiro and Allura were talking quietly on the other side of the Lion, and Allura was holding a small holographic 3D map that seemed to be the part of the galaxy they’d found themselves in—working out a  way to get back to where they were needed most, Keith was sure.

It was still kind of taking Keith by surprise, how much he’d gotten used to these people, some of them strangers when he met them, over the course of the time they’d spent together. He hadn’t been counting days or anything, but it had been a couple months at most since they’d first met Allura and Coran, and already they were familiar. Keith had never been able to make friends that quickly or easily on Earth, not even Shiro.

“Earth to Keith!” Keith was startled out of his thoughts by Lance’s gloved hand being waved in his face. “Or Castle to Keith? How does this work if we’re in space?” Lance continued musing.

“I get the idea,” Keith said. “Sorry, I was just . . . thinking.”

“What, didn’t you have enough time for that on the jungle planet?”

“Ha ha. You know, you can spend as much time thinking as you want; you should try it sometime.”

Lance opened his mouth, no doubt to make a somewhat-witty retort, but was cut off by Hunk’s voice calling from the Red Lion.

“Uh, Keith? What’s this box doing here?”

Box? Since when did he have a box in the cockpit?

Oh. Oh no.

The box of Galra food he’d found on the planet, and then taken back to the Lion. How had he forgotten about that? All his other efforts to hide things from the others and he didn’t think to get rid of the Galra supplies in his own Lion!

Keith headed for the cockpit of the Lion, trying to keep his cool. After all, Hunk didn’t sound suspicious or anything, just confused. Behind him, he could hear Lance’s footsteps, no doubt following him to see what was going on. Shiro and Allura looked up from their map to watch Keith walk back to his Lion.

Inside the cockpit, the box of Galra rations had been pulled from against the wall to the middle of the floor. Hunk was nervously toeing it with his boot, and Pidge was examining one of the foil-wrapped bars from inside, though they hadn’t unwrapped it yet. Coran was standing near one of Red’s partially-disassembled control panels, watching with mild interest.

“Oh. That box,” Keith said, sounding dumb even to himself. “I’d forgotten about it.” Put it out of his mind, really, but forgetting it wasn’t a lie, and the more truth he left in his account of things, the better.

“Yeah,” Hunk said awkwardly. “I’m guessing you picked it up on the jungle planet, right?”

“What’re these things in the foil?” Pidge cut in before Keith could say anything. “I’m guessing they’re why you took the box, so what’s in these?”

“It’s some kind of alien food bar,” Keith said. “I found it in the jungle with some ship debris. Whoever left it was long gone, and it was a change from the leaves and stuff on the planet, so I figured I’d pick it up.”

Never mind the fact that the crashed ship was Galra, that this was Galra food. They didn’t need to know that, not yet, maybe not ever.

Upon hearing it was food, Hunk hesitantly unwrapped one of the bars and carefully sniffed it before taking a small bite. Keith should’ve guessed that Hunk would want to try this alien food, and for a moment he was grateful that he’d kept the box on board so Hunk would get a probably once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try them (since it wasn’t like they were going to steal Galra food or get held prisoner by the Galra if they could help it). Keith tried to keep a straight face, waiting for Hunk to find out how tasty the bars were.

Instead, Hunk seemed to be struggling to swallow the bar instead of spitting it out. When he finally did, instead of taking another bite, he carefully rolled it back up in the wrapping.

“Ugh. Whoever made those _definitely_ did not have human taste buds in mind,” Hunk said, grimacing a bit. “Keith, I can understand wanting variety, but was eating these really worth it?”

Of course. Of _fucking_ course the bars tasted like shit to the others. They were Galra food, and Keith was a Galra, and that was the only reason they’d tasted good to him. Wasn’t that why he’d wanted to forget about them in the first place, after all—because they were a reminder he wasn’t human anymore?

Not trusting his voice to stay steady, Keith just shrugged in response and stared at one of the walls instead of making eye contact.

“Let me see that,” Shiro asked from behind Keith, because of course, the one thing that could make this worse was happening. He was helpless to do anything but watch as Hunk handed Shiro the unwrapped food bar, which Shiro reopened and examined.

“I recognize this,” Shiro said. “It’s a Galra ration bar. They gave the prisoners these sometimes.” He quickly handed the bar off to Lance, who seemed to be considering whether or not to try it.

“Keith,” Shiro said, resting a hand on the Red Paladin’s shoulder. Keith struggled not to jump at the sudden touch. “Were there Galra on that planet?”

Keith shrugged again, successfully getting Shiro’s hand off his shoulder.

“The Red Lion didn’t pick up on anything alive within range of her scanners, and I never saw anything alive either,” Keith said.

“Still, for Galra supplies to have ended up in the area is worrying,” Allura said. Keith hadn’t even noticed her coming in after Shiro. The cockpit was starting to feel overcrowded, claustrophobic, though that might just be Keith’s panic.

“It seemed like it had been there for a while,” Keith added, but it didn’t seem to change Allura’s attitude much.

“I’m going to go set the Castle on a course away from here just in case,” she said. “It’s not like I’m much help fixing the Lion right now, anyway.” With that, she headed for the bridge.

“Allura is right,” Shiro said. “We should work on getting the Red Lion fixed as soon as we can, but Keith, Lance, and I aren’t going to be much help, so we’ll get out of your way.” Shiro made his way out of the Red Lion, Lance following behind, still considering the Galra ration bar. Keith hesitated for a moment, not eager to leave Red behind, but finally followed the other two out of the cockpit.

Out in the hangar, it seemed Lance had finally decided to try the ration bar, taking a bite from the same end as Hunk and almost immediately making exaggerated gagging noises.

“Those things took a lot of getting used to,” Shiro said, and it took Keith a second to realize he was the one being addressed. “It says a lot about you, that you managed to eat them when you had to.”

 _Yeah, like that I’m a Galra_ , Keith thought bitterly. The bars that Shiro had no doubt fought to keep in his stomach for sustenance had been a tasty snack for his surprisingly-Galra taste buds.

“You did what had to be done to make it through,” Shiro said. “Good job, Keith.”

Shiro walked out of the room, headed towards the training center, but on his way out he casually ruffled Keith’s hair.

What should have been a reassuring gesture was now a terrifying one, one that risked exposing Keith for a Galra, and he’d just seen that the others wouldn’t be nearly as accepting of that as he’d hoped they might be when he first arrived. Frantically, Keith tried to smooth his hair out, pulling as much of his bangs over his face as he could, desperately hoping his hair was covering the right parts of his face.

Lance, who had by this point finished his show of gagging and swallowed the bite of Galra food, was now staring at Keith as he fixed his hair. Keith froze. Had he seen a patch of purple skin? The now-pointed tips of one of Keith’s ears? Was he figuring it out? Was he about to call for the others?

“Never pegged you as one to care so much about your hair, mullet boy,” Lance said, and then he turned and walked down the same hallway Shiro had earlier. Keith let out a sigh of relief. That had been a close one— _way_ too close for his taste.

Being around the others had been nice, but Shiro had just thrown into perspective how fragile Keith’s secret was to keep. Once well-intentioned friendly shove, or hair rustle, was all it would take for them to see the purple of Keith’s skin, and from there one of them was sure to piece together what Keith was now. He’d have to be far more careful than he’d ever been in his life if he wanted to make it out of this.

Keith headed down the hall to what was (for now) his room in the Castle, eager to lock the door and let down the façade that everything was okay.


	10. Training

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith spends his time in the training room. Lance decides to join him.

It had been easy to forget the transformation, on the jungle planet. Well, not easy, exactly, but easier than it was now. Keith barely saw his own reflection, and there was no one around to see him, so it was only the physical aspects of the transformation that reminded him of it: the itching of his skin as the purple spread across it, or the ache of his bones as they stretched to a height closer to the Galra norm. Now he had to contend not only with that, but also with trying to hide it from the others.

Keith had never been one to show a lot of skin, but keeping it all covered without exception was a lot harder than he’d ever realized, especially now that his clothes from Earth, which once fit perfectly, were a couple inches too short to keep his wrists and ankles covered, not to mention that his gloves were fingerless. Of all the outfits to leave Earth in, this wasn’t the worst possible by far, but there was also no way he could wear it out of his room anymore, which left him with only his Paladin armor.

The armor at least covered almost all of his skin, except his face, of course, though thankfully that seemed to be staying skin-colored for the moment, with the exception of that streak across his cheek. Still, while the others wore their armor around the Castle on occasion, Keith knew it was beginning to look suspicious that he never took his off.

The workaround that Keith found for this was to spend some time in the training room before he had to be around any of the others. While he’d trained in his clothes from Earth before, it wasn’t unusual for any of the Paladins to train in their armor, and no one could blame Keith for not changing out of it immediately afterward.

And so Keith spent what time he couldn’t stay locked safely in his room in the training room, letting off the excess energy he’d been keeping up pent inside since the fight with Zarkon. It was refreshing, to be able to spend an hour or so focused entirely on the training bots and defeating them, instead of on what new ways his body had found to betray him. Keith was eager to forget himself, let his mind go blank and focus on the task at hand.

The problem came when someone else wanted to train at the same time.

It had only been a few days since Keith’s return when he turned around in the training room to find Lance standing behind him, also in full armor.

“Lance?” Keith asked, trying not to let on that Lance’s appearance had nearly startled him half to death.

“The one and only,” Lance said. “Noticed you’ve been in the training room a lot lately. Did you lose all your muscles lazing about in the jungle?”

“As if,” Keith retorted before he could think better of it. There was only one place this discussion would go now, he could tell.

“Feel like proving it?” Lance asked. “That is, if you think you could even land a blow on the training bot when I’m around to take care of it.”

“If one of us is going to take it down without the other even getting a blow in, I think that’d be me, not you. No offense, but in these conditions, my sword is a lot more effective than your gun is.”

“Oh, it’s on, Keith!”

Of course. Keith had known it was coming from the moment Lance walked into the training center, and now the two were facing off again. Still, Lance challenging him was familiar, just another part of life in the Castle. The back-and-forth they had, however much of it wound up being accidental on Keith’s part, was something he was beginning to know like the back of his hand—better, considering what had happened to his hands.

And there was something about fighting alongside Lance, each trying to keep the training bot out of reach of the other so they could take it out themselves, that was comforting. Keith _knew_ that right here, right now, Lance was only keeping the training bot from getting near Keith to keep it out of the reach of his sword, but it was easy to forget, to imagine they were in an actual battle and Lance was trying to protect him. Keith fell into the same behavior easily, kicking the training bot away from Lance like it was instinct. They might as well have been fighting alongside each other for years, not weeks.

But it was stupid for him to be thinking that right now, stupid to be thinking at all. Keith’s life wasn’t in danger, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a lot to lose here.

“Keith, move!” Lance called, tackling the Red Paladin out of the way of the training bot, pinning his back to the floor. Keith’s bayard retracted, thankfully not slicing up either of the boys, but the jolt of the tackle knocked Keith’s helmet loose.

Keith froze, not daring to breathe with Lance’s face only a few inches above his own. The training bot had paused, sensing both paladins on the floor and not taking advantage of it with the settings Lance had put in. Keith could feel Lance’s weight on his chest, and no doubt the Blue Paladin had a close-up view of the purple skin that Keith’s hair, now stringy with sweat, had managed to keep covered until now.

He wasn’t sure how Lance would react. Maybe he’d question Keith, at first, before he realized. Maybe he’d realize right away, and call the others for help. There were a thousand possibilities, and Keith wasn’t sure which of them was the worst.

Lance made a strange noise, and pushed himself off the ground, standing up and brushing his armor off even though Keith was pretty sure there was no dust on the training room floor. Keith took the opportunity to scramble for his helmet and place it back on his head. It wouldn’t undo what damage had already been done, but Keith felt safer with his helmet on, with something between him and the rest of the world, whatever protection it did or didn’t actually offer.

“Could’ve thanked me, at least,” Lance said after a moment, pouting in a somewhat obnoxious way.

“Uh, what?” Keith asked. Thank him for not screaming, and calling the others? For not freaking out and trying to kill him?

“I saved your life!” Lance said. “Or, would have, if this was a real battle.” He turned his attention back to the training bot, which was showing signs of getting back into combat mode, waiting for Lance to signal it to resume.

So had Lance not seen? He must not have, if he was still acting this way. Keith couldn’t believe it. He realized he was shaking, had been for a while now, at the thought of being found out. He tried to calm down, but that had been way too close. If it had been anyone else, they surely would have seen the purple to Keith’s skin, the point at the tip of his ears, all the little signs he’d been able to hide from a distance but not at that close range.

“I think I’m done for the day,” he told Lance, getting to his still-shaky knees. There was no way he could go back to training, after such a close call. Not now, not ever.

“Aw, what?” Lance complained. “It’s no fun to beat you when you’re just giving up!”

“Well, sorry for ruining your ‘fun’, but I’m done,” Keith said. “I’ll see you later, Lance.”

Keith walked out of the training room, back towards his room. He was beginning to get a little sick of the plain, metal space, but as Lance had just shown him, it wasn’t safe for him to be elsewhere anymore.

And despite what he’d said, Keith didn’t think he’d see Lance again before he left if he could help it. If Lance realized that Keith was Galra, his disgust might very well kill something inside Keith.


	11. What Can Be Fixed?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith checks with Hunk on the status of the Red Lion's repairs.

Keith should have left by now. He should have left the hour he set foot back on the Castle. The others had the Red Lion, they had each other, they’d be able to find a new Red Paladin. They didn’t need him, didn’t need a Galra on board the ship to split the team apart.

He’d figured that he would stay until the Red Lion was operational again, in case they needed someone connected to it to do a test run or anything. But now he wasn’t sure how much longer he could last without being found out by one of the others. He’d already stopped training, and had mostly stopped going to team meals whenever he could get out of them. There wasn’t much more he could do to prevent being found out, and it had almost happened too many times now.

The transformation hadn’t stopped, either, even now that he’d left the planet. Every day there was more purple skin to cover, as the purple crept further across his face and the growth spurt continued, leaving him six inches taller than he had been before. He was only barely shorter than Shiro, now, and at this rate he’d be the tallest Paladin in only a week. His ears were growing, too, becoming more catlike, more Galra, and too big to hide with his hair much longer. Just yesterday one of them had twitched involuntarily and nearly gotten out from under the carefully-positioned lock of hair that Keith was using to hide it.

He needed to know how much longer it would be until the Red Lion was fixed, to know if it was worth trying to wait for it to be ready or if he should cut his losses and leave now.

So he waited until Coran was messing with the teludav room (something about faults in crystals, Keith didn’t really listen) and Pidge was getting some food before heading to the Red Lion’s hangar to check in with Hunk about how it was going.

“Hey, Hunk,” Keith said, trying to sound like he hadn’t been hiding in his room for the past several days, like he wasn’t terrified that one strand of hair might blow out of place and leave some Galra part of him on display. “How’re the repairs going?”

To his credit, Hunk seemed to take Keith’s sudden reappearance, and interest, in stride.

“Pretty well, considering how much damage she’s taken,” he said, casually messing with some mechanical components that Keith didn’t really recognize. “There’s a lot to be replaced, cracked pipes, snapped wires, that sort of thing. The Lions can self-repair a crazy amount of damage, but even they have their limits.”

It was good to hear that Red was being taken care of. Even though he knew he’d be leaving soon, that Red would have a new Paladin soon enough, Keith still had a bond with her, and he was glad she’d be okay. But Hunk hadn’t answered the question Keith was really getting at.

“How long do you think it’ll take?”

“Not entirely sure,” Hunk said. “Probably at least a couple more days. That rough landing certainly didn’t do her any favors, and we could run into problems we weren’t expecting.”

“Oh,” Keith said. It was all he could think of. He’d been hoping that the Red Lion would be ready sooner than that, so he could leave before any of the others found out about him, and every time he saw one of them it was a closer call than the last. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could last on the ship without slipping up, without one of the others finding out. He would be leaving one way or the other, whether they found out and kicked him off the Castle or not, but the thought of them hating him, of having to see the looks of disgust on their faces – that idea was even worse than the knowledge that he’d never see them again.

“Are you . . . okay, Keith? No offense or anything, but you’ve been acting really standoffish. Well, more standoffish than normal, since you got back.”

Keith froze for a second. He’d been trying to avoid contact with the others so that they wouldn’t notice anything wrong with him, but that avoidance seemed just as wrong to them, if for a different reason. Hunk wasn’t worried about Keith being Galra, or at least Keith didn’t think he was yet. He was worried about Keith’s wellbeing, which to be honest he was fair to worry about, since Keith had been nothing but a ball of stress and self-depreciation since finding out he was becoming Galra.

That didn’t mean that Keith could tell Hunk about it, though. His worry was well-intentioned, but if Keith opened up to him even a little bit, that worry for Keith would evaporate in an instant once Hunk knew the truth.

“I’m fine,” Keith said, though it sounded forced even to him. He winced and tried to cover his tracks. “It’s just . . . different, being back with people again.”

“Yeah, I guess being stuck on a lifeless planet for a couple weeks wouldn’t do your social skills any favors,” Hunk admitted, but Keith could see the worry in his eyes as his gaze lingered on Keith. Whatever. There wasn’t really much that Keith could do about it. He certainly wasn’t going to say “Hey, don’t worry, I’ve only been avoiding everyone because I’m somehow turning into the monsters we fight and I was trying to avoid having you all hate me!”

Hunk had gone back to working with some of the alien tools that Coran had left in the hangar, but Keith could tell he was only fidgeting with them, using them to keep his hands busy. Keith sighed internally at the thought of what he was about to do, but even if he was soon to leave the Paladins, that didn’t mean he could just leave one of them to stew in his own thoughts like this.

“Hunk,” Keith said, breaking the awkward silence of the hangar with his even-more-awkward explanation. Hunk looked up, still distracted.

“Look, I may be going through some stuff, but it’s nothing you need to worry about,” Keith said. _I’ll be out of your hair before it ever gets to the point that you need to worry_ , he thought but didn’t say. “I just need to work through some stuff that . . . happened to me on the planet.”

Hunk paused for a moment before replying, and Keith started going over his wording again in his head, trying to figure out where he’d given himself away.

“I get it,” Hunk said at last. “Some crazy stuff happened to Lance and I on the planet we landed on—oh man, I haven’t told you that story yet—anyway, I can see needing some time to think things over. Just don’t forget to include the rest of us every once in a while, okay? We’re the Paladins of Voltron, we’ve got your back, same as I know you’ve got ours.”

Keith nodded, clenching his jaw tightly. His teeth and jaw ached with the pressure, but he didn’t let up. He didn’t trust his voice to not give him away right now, and he could feel tears in the corners of his eyes. He turned and walked out of the room before Hunk could wonder why Keith was having such an emotional response to something Hunk had meant as mundane and benign.

But no matter what Hunk said, no matter how much Keith wanted to believe that he and the others would have Keith’s back no matter what, he knew it wasn’t true. Keith was Galra, he was the enemy, one of the race that had killed Allura and Coran’s people, tortured Shiro, kidnapped Pidge’s family. The others might have had his back despite almost anything else, but this was one thing he knew they wouldn’t be able to deal with. If he stayed, they would be torn apart, the bonds of trust within their group shattered. If he left, they would have to replace him, but Allura had enough temper for Red already, Keith figured. Even if she didn’t, there were galaxies of people out there who did. People who weren’t Galra.

Keith would do more harm by staying than he ever could by leaving, and no matter what Hunk said now, Keith couldn’t count himself as one of the Paladins of Voltron anymore.


	12. Space 3 A.M.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith bumps into Pidge in the Castle's kitchen at 3 a.m.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for not updating last week, I had a really crazy few days: I graduated college, had to move out of my college apartment, did a job interview, and got my wisdom teeth out back-to-back. I might start updating this story twice a week to finish it up more quickly; would you guys be interested in that? let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading!

The last bit of human-colored skin on Keith’s face disappeared while he slept. He’d been expecting it for days now, but still, it was one thing to know that sometime in the near future you’d be indistinguishable from the enemy, and another to stumble into the bathroom at the space equivalent of 3 am and learn that the freckle-like patches of your original skin color had disappeared without you even being aware, replaced with smooth lavender skin and a weird slightly darker stripe curling up your right cheek.

Keith hadn’t left his room while the others were awake in two days, anyway—after his talk with Hunk he’d holed himself up in his room, only visiting the kitchen in the middle of the night when the others were asleep. There was no one around but him to notice the change, no one who’d have thought any more of him for having a few flecks of human skin coloring across his otherwise-Galra face.

Still, he couldn’t help himself from spending too long in front of the mirror, longer than he’d looked since he’d realized what was happening to him, scouring his face for any trace of his familiar skin. But no matter how hard he looked, he found nothing but new evidence of how much he was changing—his ears had crept further up his head, thinned and pointed almost like a cat’s, with the soft beginnings of purple hair growing in on the back of them, and the whites of his eyes were looking yellower than they had before, though he prayed it was just contrast against his purple skin. His eyes were one familiar landmark in his increasingly-alien face, and he didn’t know what he’d do if they went Galra, too. Would he wake up one day and find a total stranger in the mirror? A Galra indistinguishable from the soldiers he’d fought so hard to protect the universe from? The thought made him shudder, but luck hadn’t been on his side yet throughout this transformation.

It felt disturbingly final. The more of his skin had changed, the less Keith could pretend it would ever get better, but until now, he’d been able to see at least some hint of himself under the purple exterior, as if the alien appearance was makeup not entirely applied. But now the coloring had reached every part of him. There was no going back. Even the ache in his bones from the growth spurts had eased—leaving him what he figured was seven inches taller than he had been on Earth, though the Castle didn’t exactly have any rulers in human measurements. The whole transformation seemed to be tapering off, leaving him with a lingering ache in his bones and jaw, ears that were too sensitive to touch and sound alike, and an appearance that would probably make his friends shoot him on sight.

Keith almost wished to go back to when he thought it was a rash.

Of course, life on the Castle didn’t change for the others, not in any way Keith could tell. He could hear movement in Lance’s room next door sometimes as the Blue Paladin woke up for training exercises with the others, going about the usual schedule as though Keith had never been a part of it. That was the whole point of hiding his transformation, of course, let the others get used to Keith not being around so they’d be okay on their own once he left, but for some reason Keith didn’t feel relieved. Everything was going perfectly according to plan, so why did he wish it wasn’t?

It didn’t matter, really. The repairs on Red were going well, and while her weapons systems were still being worked on, her mobility was back to normal—possibly even a bit better than it had been, if Hunk and Pidge had their way. Keith would be gone soon enough, and the others could get on with finding a new Paladin and saving the galaxy from the likes of him.

He wouldn’t let this get to him. He’d known it was coming. He didn’t have any right to get emotional over it.

It was already the time he’d gotten used to waking up, situated between those who stayed up latest going to bed and those who got up earliest starting their days, when he could move around the Castle without worrying about running into anyone. He could wear his clothes from Earth, which didn’t exactly fit him around the shoulders or ankles anymore, but were more comfortable than wearing the layered Paladin’s armor just to run to the kitchen for fifteen minutes and eat a bowl of space goo.

Keith forced himself to do just that. He threw his jacket on, hating to see more of his Galra-purple skin exposed than he needed to, and headed for the kitchen like he had a dozen times before. He wasn’t going to let this get to him.

Keith was reluctant to say that any part of the transformation had been good, in any way, but the night vision was helpful for traveling around the Castle without needing to turn the lights up and possibly catching someone’s attention. He was fairly confident that no one knew about his comings and goings, or at least about the times when he was coming and going.

He’d already dispensed a bowl of the food goo—which had tasted even more bitter than usual since he’d come back to the Castle, but he’d already known that his taste buds were different now—when he heard someone else enter the room. 

Keith flinched instinctively, biting down hard on the spoon in his mouth as he waited for whoever was there to switch the lights on, to catch him not even a little bit hidden. But a second passed and the room stayed dark. Keith held his breath as he heard the person walk further into the room, towards the food goo dispensers – and Keith himself. He didn’t dare turn his head to see who it was, in case the motion alerted them to turn on the lights, but in a few steps the person was in view.

Keith had never run into Pidge on one of his nighttime food runs before, and the Green Paladin looked in the condition he’d expect from someone getting food at space 3 am –well, someone other than him. Pidge’s hair was unkempt, sticking out at odd angles, and their body was slouched over to be even shorter than usual with apparent exhaustion. He doubted Pidge had even noticed he was in the room, with how exhausted they looked. Maybe he could get out of here without them realizing.

So of course Pidge turned to get a bowl, blinked, and finally seemed to recognize that Keith was in there.

“Hey, Keith,” they said, voice casual and slightly slurred with lack of sleep, and Keith waited for them to do something else, like turn on the lights or take a second look at him and notice something was off. But all Pidge did was pour themselves a bowl of food goop and plop down on the floor to eat it.

“How’d you know it was me?” Keith asked once it was apparent that Pidge wasn’t going to do anything that might risk Keith’s secret getting out. He took a look at the spoon he’d bitten down on, to see if there was blood on it, but his color vision was almost nonexistent in the dark. He supposed it didn’t really matter.

“Process of elimination,” Pidge said. “All the others went to bed already, and we haven’t seen you for a couple days now, so I figured you might be doing stuff at night. Did you get on a nocturnal schedule on that planet you were on or something?”

“Maybe,” Keith answered. It was safer for Pidge to think that than for them to know he was trying to avoid the others. “What about you? Did your sleep schedule get messed up on that trash planet?”

Pidge laughed, the kind of laugh that people only make at 3 am when _everything_ is funny.

“Nah,” Pidge said. “I was only there for like, a day. I just got really wrapped up in the project I was working on.”

“What are you working on?” Keith asked, genuinely curious. Here in the darkness, where he didn’t have to worry about Pidge seeing anything Galra about him, it was easy to forget that the last few weeks had happened, and pretend that he was still just one of the Paladins. It was easy to carry on a conversation like normal. Too easy, maybe. But he’d had his last encounters with the other Paladins already, had gotten the chance to bid them goodbye in his mind if not out loud. He and Pidge had never been the closest, but he was still glad for this last chance to spend time with them, glad that it felt so casual, almost like he could stay on the Castle if he wanted to.

Pidge excitedly launched into a description of their latest program, which would scan security records with facial recognition software in an attempt to find their brother, Matt. Keith had met Matt, once, through Shiro. He hoped Pidge would be able to find him. No one deserved to be prisoner to the Galra.

Keith had never been the most technically-inclined person – he knew enough about the controls of a spaceship to pilot it and maybe do a few repairs, but he’d never been able to understand coding in the way he’d need to in order to understand Pidge’s project in any detail. Instead of paying attention to the monologue that was quickly flying over his head, Keith found his tongue poking at his teeth where he’d bitten the spoon. The blood had subsided some, which was good—the last thing Keith needed was a major injury right now. Still, something wasn’t quite right. It seemed like his canine tooth, the one that had taken the brunt of the bite on the spoon, was loose.

It made sense that he’d loosened a tooth, given that he’d bitten down quite hard on a metal spoon, but Keith was hesitant to trust that the bite was the only reason his tooth was loose. The rest of his body was betraying him already, what guarantee was there that his teeth would be exempt?

Cautiously, Keith felt the canine tooth on the other side of his mouth. It felt sturdier than the other, though he couldn’t tell if it was completely anchored in place.

God, he was checking for loose teeth at three in the morning while Pidge was trying to tell him about their project. There was something ridiculous about this being where he’d wound up, or maybe something sad. It _was_ 3 am; emotions made less sense at 3 am than they did the rest of the time.

“Keith? You okay?” Pidge asked, having stopped explaining their project at some point Keith hadn’t realized.

“Huh?” Keith said, momentarily stunned. “Oh yeah, I’m fine.” The lie slipped out easily from long practice back on Earth. He didn’t even have to think twice.

Pidge was giving him a skeptical look – well, Keith assumed it was intended for him, but given that Pidge couldn’t see in the dark, the skeptical look was actually aimed a couple feet to Keith’s left.

“Yeah, forgive me if I don’t believe that for a second,” Pidge said, taking another bite of their food goo. “It’s the middle of the night and I’m done with acting neurotypical and polite for the day, but we’re all worried about you, you know. We actually talk to each other, unlike some people, and you’ve been giving us a lot to be worried about you for. Everyone wants to give you space to come forward with it on your own, but I don’t think you’re going to, are you?”

“No,” Keith admitted. Pidge had already figured out that there was a reason to pay attention to him, and the best he could hope for now was stalling them until after he could get off the ship. “I did need time, to come to grips with . . . things, myself.” Better to leave in as much of the truth as he could. Keith wasn’t the best at lying on the spot. But honestly, he thought he’d mostly come to terms with what he was becoming. He’d come to terms with having to leave the others, being hated by most of the galaxy, in an abstract sense at least.

“That’s fine, but I hope you’ve had enough time,” Pidge said. “I’m getting tired of watching everyone dance around this. The universe needs Voltron, and we can’t help anyone if we can’t even get ahold of one of our own Paladins.”

“Got it,” Keith said, a little more sharply than he needed to, maybe, but if Pidge was getting tired of the deception, than Keith was more than exhausted of it. Pidge didn’t seem to mind, anyway.

“Thank God,” Pidge said. “If that’s settled, I’m going to bed. Make sure you get some sleep, okay?”

“Sure,” Keith said, for once actually meaning what he was saying. Sleep was about the only thing he could still do, anymore.

Pidge left their dirty bowl on the counter and headed back to their room. Keith waited until he’d heard their door open and shut before he took Pidge’s bowl and his own and loaded them into the Castle’s dish-cleaning machine, and then headed back to his own room.

The Castle was quiet at this hour, the lights dimmed, the whir of machinery fainter. It was almost lonelier than the jungle planet had been, because here, it was clear that there were supposed to be people there that _weren’t_. He missed the Castle during the day, with everyone crossing paths and talking.

Seeing Pidge had gotten him nostalgic for something that seemed so close but that he could never have again. Keith wasn’t sure whether that was a bad thing or not.

Despite only being awake for an hour, Keith went back to his room and lay down on his bed. He should have stayed up, should have worked on gathering supplies to take while leaving the Castle, or searching the Castle’s systems to find somewhere to go, but he couldn’t stand the emptiness that he felt in here anymore. Instead, he drifted into sleep to escape it.


	13. Brother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro makes a surprising declaration, and Keith reconsiders his plan to leave the team

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're at the beginning of the end now! To those of you looking forward to Keith revealing his Galra transformation to the other paladins, that's coming up soon ;)  
> Hope you enjoy!

Keith woke to a knock on the door.

The others had been leaving him more or less to his own devices for the past week, not trying to pull him into training exercises or group meals after the first few rejected offers, so one of them knocking on the door was _not_ something he was expecting.

He stumbled out of bed, catching himself a second before opening the door as he remembered what had happened, why he was avoiding the others now. He froze with his Galra-purple hand halfway to the door control panel and slowly withdrew it. Of all the close encounters he’d had since returning to the Castle, he never thought his own stupidity could cause one of them.

He found himself wishing that the doors on the Castle had some kind of peephole. There was a camera/viewscreen setup installed, but it worked in both directions, so whoever was knocking would be able to see him too, which kind of defeated the point of not opening the door.

In the long run, it didn’t matter, because Keith recognized the person’s voice as soon as they spoke.

“Keith? You awake?”

Shiro.

Of all people to be here, now of all times, it had to be Shiro, the person Keith respected most on the ship and the one that might be the most hurt by his current appearance (Coran and Allura were a close second, seeing as how the Galra had destroyed their planet, but they hadn’t been held prisoner and tortured by the Galra like Shiro had).

“Uh, yeah,” Keith said, fumbling for something to cover himself a bit better should Shiro open the door. Keith had locked it, of course, but depending on how worried the others were, Coran might have been able to give him the emergency override codes to open it.

“Pidge told me that you two had a talk last night?” Shiro called through the door, somewhat hesitantly, and Keith cursed under his breath. Of course Pidge would have told Shiro if Keith was in bad shape. He shouldn’t have let on that something was bothering him, should have kept up the act until he was safely away from everyone else.

“Uh, yeah,” Keith said. “It was pretty late, though, we were both kind of out of it.”

He was trying to write it off, hoping Shiro would too, but the chances of that were unfortunately slim. Once Shiro was worried, it could take a lot to make him reassured again.

And on top of that, his tooth was still loose from the other night. Looser, maybe. Keith prodded it with his tongue experimentally, but what he’d said to Shiro wasn’t entirely a lie – no one was at their most rational at 3 am, and he couldn’t remember how loose his tooth had been then.

“Well, Pidge said you were trying to come to grips with something, and I thought I might be able to help,” Shiro said, his voice toeing the line between concerned and authoritarian.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Keith said, more defensively than he meant to. “I think I’ve gotten it all worked out just fine on my own.” He couldn’t rely on Shiro’s help anymore, not when he wouldn’t have it for much longer.

“Keith, that’s obviously not true,” Shiro said. “You’re holing yourself up in your room, you don’t come out for meals, you don’t even train anymore. When’s the last time you even visited Red?”

It _had_ been a while. Keith had wanted to make sure the Red Lion was okay before he left, but he hadn’t actually been visiting her to check on her, aside from the one time he’d stopped by to check in with Hunk while he was working on Red. He felt a pang of guilt about leaving his Lion alone when no doubt she’d appreciate his presence, and she’d never seemed to have a problem with his appearance back on the jungle planet, so there was a good chance she might not even mind him as he was.

But he didn’t feel worthy of visiting her like this. He wasn’t worthy of being a Paladin, wasn’t worthy of Red’s trust, of being accepted despite what he was, because he was Galra, the enemy, a monster.

“Keith,” Shiro said, and there was a pause as he seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “You can’t keep cutting yourself off from the rest of us like this. Whatever happened to you on the jungle planet, whatever’s on your mind, we can work through it together, as a team. But we need you here, with us, to make it work.”

Some very small part of Keith wanted to slam the door open, to let Shiro see what was wrong with him, and see how quickly Shiro backpedaled on those words. Would Shiro call for the others, have them handcuff Keith up and keep him under guard as they tried to figure out what had happened? Or would Shiro see a Galra and power up his arm, the one the Galra had taken from him and replaced, and cut him down like any of the countless soldiers they’d faced?

Thinking about it made Keith sick to his stomach, but he couldn’t stop, in the same way he couldn’t force his tongue to stop prodding at his increasingly-loose tooth.

Keith didn’t open the door. He didn’t say anything, either, not trusting his voice. His tongue kept prodding the loose tooth until he could taste blood again, and he didn’t stop.

Outside the door, Keith could hear Shiro sigh.

“Some leader I am,” he said, in a voice that Keith probably wouldn’t have heard if not for the ridiculous sensitivity of Galra ears. “Can’t even help my own brother.”

A shiver ran up Keith’s back at the words. _He thinks of me as a brother?_

“Come find me when you’re ready to talk,” he said at a normal volume, and after a brief pause, Keith heard his footsteps marching down the hallway.

“I want to. I just can’t,” he whispered to the door. He wanted nothing more, in this moment, than to open the door and hug Shiro, consequences be damned, but his body felt locked in place.

Shiro’s footsteps stopped for a moment, and Keith bit his tongue in instant regret, fearing that Shiro would turn around, would force the door open with some kind of emergency access code and demand to know what was wrong and s _ee_ what Keith had become.

He was still scared that even though Shiro cared about him, _considered him a brother_ , that he would see Keith as a Galra before he saw him as himself. He was scared of what he would say, what he would do. He was terrified by the idea he might even scare Shiro.

But after a moment’s pause, Shiro’s footsteps resumed, and Keith breathed a sigh of relief.

He couldn’t put this off much longer. The others were getting worried, and less willing to leave him alone, and he wasn’t sure how much longer it would be before one of them kicked down his door to try to drag him back out. He wasn’t sure how much longer it would be before Voltron was needed, and the others would need a Red Paladin.

Maybe he _should_ talk to them, tell them what he’d become. Shiro had seemed really upset by Keith shutting himself away; was it possible that feeling would be stronger than his hatred for the Galra? Pidge, too, had been worried, and Hunk. Was their worry, their care for him, greater than their war against the Galra?

He’d spent so long considering no other option, but it seemed like the other Paladins cared about him as much as he cared about them. Maybe, just maybe, they cared for Keith enough to not care what he was.

His tongue started wiggling his loose tooth again, and Keith couldn’t be bothered to stop. He was a bundle of nerves right now, and he needed to release that energy _somehow_. The training deck was right out, so he didn’t have many other options.

Maybe they would accept him. Maybe they would throw him out themselves. Keith played out a hundred possible scenarios in his head, from a grudging acceptance to the others not even noticing to being kept prisoner as a traitor.

And then his tongue pushed a little too hard against his loose tooth, or the tooth was looser than he’d thought; either way, the tooth fell out. Keith spat it out into his hand so he could keep track of it.

He should’ve expected this to be the outcome of wiggling a loose tooth like he’d been doing, but it was still a surprise. He hadn’t lost a tooth in how long now? Years, just under a decade, he thought. He could taste blood in his mouth, but only a little bit.

Keith stumbled into his bathroom to check out the place where his tooth had been in the mirror. Maybe he could try to wedge it back in, or something. It wasn’t like there were dentists in space, so he’d have to figure this one out himself.

What he first noticed in the mirror wasn’t the gap in his teeth but his eyes. The sclera, normally white, had turned a definite yellow color, not quite the intensity of Galra eyes yet, but well on their way. And were his irises flecked with that same yellow, too? Keith couldn’t remember if the flecks of golden yellow in his mostly-purple eyes had always been there or not.

He was getting distracted. Yes, it had been a while since he’d looked in the mirror, but he’d come in here to take a look at the spot where his tooth had fallen out.

In the mirror, it looked fine, at least as far as he could tell. No gushing blood (in fact, the little bleeding there had been when the tooth fell out seemed to have stopped), so that was a good sign. Keith quickly washed his hands and the tooth and set about trying to shove it back into place, but it was not working at all. It almost felt like something was in the way, keeping his tooth from going back into position.

Keith prodded at the newly-empty gum with a finger, trying to see if something had gotten lodged in it somehow, when he felt a sharp prick against his finger. He pulled his hand out of his mouth to find a drop of blood welling on the finger he’d been using to explore the place where his tooth had fallen out.

He tried again with a different finger, much more carefully than the first time, and felt the sharp beginning of a tooth tucked into the gum, ready to push itself out.

No, not a tooth. A fang.

For some _stupid_ reason, he’d thought the transformation was more or less done. His skin was Galra-purple, his ears and height were more Galra than human, and even his senses had been altered. He figured that had been the end of things, that there wasn’t much more that he could lose of his original body. He hadn’t thought that his _teeth_ of all things would be a part of this, too. How much more was going to change that he didn’t predict?

Would this affect his mind? Would he become like the Galra soldiers they fought: violent, loyal to an emperor that wanted to enslave the universe, determined to take out Voltron?

He couldn’t risk hurting the team, or turning on them. Maybe his mind wouldn’t change, but he couldn’t risk the fate of the universe, couldn’t risk _his friends_ , on a gamble as uncertain as that.

He’d already packed his things. He’d quietly prepped an escape pod to use. He just needed to buckle down and do it.

Tonight, before anyone but him could be hurt by this, he’d leave the Castle forever.


	14. I See What You Did There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance learns too much, and Keith makes a break for it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay in updating, but this is the first chapter posted from my new apartment! I just got internet like 10 minutes ago, lol.

Keith wanted to sleep, he really did. He wanted to pass his last day in the Castle without knowing it. But he’d slept too much in the past day or so, and it seemed that particular oblivion was beyond his reach.

Instead, he found himself lying on his bed, idly wrapping and unwrapping the cloth around his knife’s handle. He’d spent years wondering about the glowing purple marks on the knife’s handle before this. It felt almost anticlimactic to find out his knife was Galra because he was turning Galra himself.

It was some small mercy, at least, that this hadn’t happened while he was still on Earth. He didn’t know what he could’ve done if he started turning purple without any idea of what the Galra were, without the possibility of taking an interstellar escape pod to some scarcely-populated planet. There was only so long a person could spend alone in the desert without seeing anyone else, after all, and while the people of Earth might not recognize him as Galra, they’d surely lock him up just the same.

The hours passed slowly, time seeming to dig its claws in and keep him in the present moment. His eyes dried out as he stared up at his glowing knife and the bright lights on the ceiling above. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the lights dimmed, a sign that it was what passed for nighttime on the ship, and Keith sat up to begin making his final preparations.

First things first: getting his Earth clothes on. He wasn’t sure the next time he’d be able to buy more clothes, and he was leaving the Paladin armor for the next Red Paladin, so he needed to take whatever Earth clothes he could. He carefully slid his knife, the handle once more carefully wrapped, back into its sheath and grabbed for his jacket, which he’d left lying on the floor.

Only, when he looked at the jacket, something about it looked _off._ Keith couldn’t figure out what it was, at first, because this was the same jacket he’d had the whole time, and it had been in the room just a couple feet from him, so nothing could have happened to it.

He realized with a start. The stripe on his jacket was yellow, or at least, it was supposed to be. But now, it looked gray – a pale shade of gray, about the right intensity for the pale shade of yellow that had been there before, but without a hint of the original color left.

Something was very, very wrong with this, and the last couple weeks had proven that when something was wrong with a situation, it was probably because something was wrong with Keith.

_No, not so soon, it can’t be . . ._

Keith unceremoniously dropped the jacket and started sprinting for the bathroom. He didn’t cut his speed in time to turn neatly into the bathroom, and instead slammed into the wall next to the door, which flew open to reveal the bathroom mirror directly across from it.

In the mirror was a reflection Keith vaguely recognized as his own. There were so many differences from his reflection a month ago – the Keith in the mirror was taller than Keith had ever been while human, and while he hadn’t been able to compare heights side-by-side, he was probably as tall as Shiro by now. His skin was a shade of lavender that still made some back corner of Keith’s brain scream, _‘Threat!’_ before recognizing the Galra figure as his own reflection. His ears were long, and pointed, and one of them twitched as he stared helplessly at his reflection. These were not new aspects of his reflection. He had watched them happen, watched as the once-familiar parts of his body disappeared under alien features. But the one part of him that had remained human until this point, that had kept him centered, was unrecognizable.

His eyes.

Gone were his purple irises, his pupils. Now his eyes were the solid, inscrutable golden eyes of the Galra.

At least, that’s what he had to assume. Without a pupil, he was getting his visual intake from some part of the solid-color eyes, and something yellow couldn’t absorb yellow light. In the mirror, his eyes looked a uniform, soulless gray.

Keith flicked his focus around desperately, hoping for some hint in the mirror of pupils, some sign of what he was looking at, some way to show emotion or concern. There was nothing. If he hadn’t been the one controlling his eyes, he would’ve guessed that he was staring straight ahead the whole time.

Keith stumbled back without thinking, knocking into something, which fell over with a crash. He barely noticed. The last trace of his human face was gone. He could barely recognize himself anymore.

He could hear shouting in the hall outside, Lance’s voice. He couldn’t be bothered to make out the words, gaze still locked on the Galra in the mirror. God, what had he become? He never should have made it off that jungle planet and back to the others. That would’ve been better for everyone.

There was more yelling, and some banging. Keith didn’t even look towards the door. Even if there was some Paladin emergency, what use was he like this?

And then came the sound of the door whooshing open.

A shiver ran up Keith’s spine, and he instinctively scrambled forward into the still-unlit bathroom a second before he heard Lance’s footsteps in the doorway.

“Keith?” he called out. “You’re really scaring me now, buddy.”

_No no no no nononono_

Keith hadn’t wanted any of the others to find him, but Lance? Lance was quite possibly one of the worst possible Paladins to do it. He did _not_ want the Blue Paladin seeing what had become of him.

But there wasn’t much he could do about it now. Lance was here, and if Keith tried to move to a better hiding spot or run out, Lance would hear him. Better just to wait, and hope he left on his own.

The flaw in this plan, Keith realized a second later, was that there weren’t exactly a plethora of hiding places in his room, and Lance seemed to be making a beeline for the bathroom.

He reached up, trying to hit the door control to close the door before Lance could see him, but he was a second too late. Before his hand made contact with the panel, he could feel the warm pressure of fingers on his wrist, pulling him up by his arm and tugging him out into the light. He resisted as much as he could, but he didn’t want to hurt Lance, and the Blue Paladin had a surprisingly tight grip.

Keith couldn’t help but turn his attention to Lance’s face, sickeningly curious about the other boy’s reaction. For a moment, Lance’s face showed shock, and then it went scarily cold and hard, as he dropped Keith’s wrist and reached a hand down as if grabbing for his bayard—but he wasn’t in uniform, he was in his Earth clothes, so Keith didn’t find a gun pointed in his face.

“How did you get onto the Castle?” Lance demanded, and it was Keith’s turn to be shocked. He hadn’t recognized himself in the mirror, but Lance didn’t recognize him either, if he thought Keith was a Galra soldier who had snuck on board.

If he played his cards right, maybe none of the others would have to find out what had happened to him. The problem was that, amidst all the other things about his body that had changed, his voice had stayed more or less the same, so talking would be a dead giveaway. As he was trying to figure out what to do, what he even _could_ do in this situation, he noticed Lance doing a double take, scanning Keith’s body once more, and then taking a closer look at his face. Keith ducked his head, but not in time.

Lance gasped, and his hand fell away from his hip.

“Keith?” he asked, unable to believe what he was seeing.

And the jig was up.

“Please, don’t tell the others,” Keith said, his voice painfully desperate. “I was going to leave tonight, I swear. You won’t have a Galra on your team, you can find a new Red Paladin, just don’t say anything and I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Keith, that’s crazy!” Lance said. “What are you even saying! You can’t leave just because ... because ...”

“Voltron _can’t_ have a Galra Paladin,” Keith said. “I know that, okay? I was just going to leave, and let everyone get on with things.”

Lance took a step back, and Keith saw the door to his room, still open, the panel blinking with a red light. Lance had used an emergency access code to open it, and no doubt everyone in the Castle had been alerted and was on their way here already. He needed to leave now if he wanted to leave at all.

“Keith, you’re a Paladin of Voltron!” Lance said, shifting to the side as he put a hand on his forehead in shock. Keith saw his opening.

“I _was_ ,” he said, and while Lance was trying to process that, Keith ducked around his side and raced to the door. He could hear Lance calling his name behind him, and chasing after him, but Keith poured everything he had into sprinting for the pod bay, where the escape pod he’d prepared was waiting for him. He was running faster than he ever had before, with longer legs, and Lance didn’t stand a chance of catching up.

An alarm turned on, green lights flickering through the hallways as a two-tone note played on repeat. It wasn’t the blaring red alarms Allura had used for emergencies that needed Voltron ASAP, but it was sure to get the attention of everyone on board.

Keith began rethinking his plan. Even if he reached the escape pod now and managed to launch it, there was no way he’d be able to escape the Castle-ship’s notice with everyone on high alert. He’d just be brought back in by the others.

He couldn’t just wait on the ship, though. It was big, but Allura and Coran would be able to find him with the Castle’s sensors, and there was no door he could lock tight enough to keep shut against their access codes, as Lance had proven by opening the door to his room.

He’d be caught if he ran, and there was nowhere on the Castle to hide.

Well, there was _one_ place that none of the others could enter without his permission. It wasn’t a place he should be going, not like this, but he didn’t want to know what would happen when the others found him. If he could just wait until he could leave unnoticed . . .

At the next intersection, Keith pulled a sharp turn in the opposite direction of the pod bay. With no other options, he found himself headed for the Red Lion’s hangar.

He just hoped that Red would still recognize him enough to let him in.


	15. Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Red Lion shows Keith something important

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early update! I just got finished revising the last two chapters (I wanted to check if I'd need to write a third to wrap things up neatly, and it turns out I don't) so I figured I'd get this one to you guys sooner rather than later. The next and final chapter will be up in the next couple days. Hope you enjoy :)

The Red Lion’s hangar was quiet when Keith arrived, the sirens from outside muted in the enormous space. Red herself towered over Keith, and for an instant he forgot about how tall he was now and felt incredibly small.

Red’s eyes lit up and she lowered her head so that he could walk up into the cockpit; patched up and back to her old self, it seemed. It felt wrong to be here, wrong to even be considering hiding inside Red when he wasn’t a Paladin of Voltron anymore, when he didn’t deserve to be with Red, but he didn’t know what else to do. As far as he could tell, he had no other options, and so he reluctantly walked up the ramp into Red’s cockpit, which darkened as Red closed the ramp again.

The dashboard lit up as he entered the room, though the viewscreen stayed dark. There was some kind of alien toolbox on the floor, and a panel pulled off one section of wall with wires spilling out, so Keith figured that Hunk and Coran were still working on repairs.

Keith started to sit on the floor, but Red growled in protest, the floor rumbling at the same time Keith felt her displeasure in his mind. He decided to stand, instead. He was clearly an unwelcome guest right now, and he didn’t want to test his luck.

Red growled again, softer this time, and gave her head a shake that sent Keith stumbling into the pilot’s chair just to keep his balance. He hadn’t thought he would ever sit here again. He readied himself to stand back up, but Red settled down and held her head still, seemingly contented. Keith didn’t know why. He didn’t belong in the cockpit at all, much less the pilot’s seat.

Red growled again, disapproval shooting through Keith’s mind. It was what he had known was coming and what he couldn’t stand. Even the others’ fear and loathing would be better than getting it from Red, who he was closer to than anyone else, who he had shared his mind with.

Keith tried to stand up, to march himself out of the cockpit and into whatever the others would do to him, but Red tipped her head back to keep him in the chair and began purring nonsensically.

“What do you want from me?” Keith demanded. “You don’t seem to want me here, but stop me every time I leave. I’m not the Red Paladin anymore, I know that, so just let me out and I’ll go away.”

Disagreement, now, was the feeling from Red. But what had he said that wasn’t true? Did Red think he would come back?

She couldn’t be disagreeing with the fact that he wasn’t a Paladin anymore, could she? He was a Galra, and Galra had no place on Team Voltron.

_Had he ever really belonged?_

Keith sighed. A dropout from the Garrison, a loner who lived in the desert, and now a Galra – there was little about him that screamed “defender of the universe”.

“What did you ever see in me?” he wondered.

He’d meant it as a rhetorical question, but Red rumbled in response, her viewscreen flickering on, the light blindingly bright for an instant. When it dimmed, Keith found himself elsewhere.

It took him a moment to recognize where he ended up, because he’d only been there once, and also because he hadn’t seen it from this angle. What he was seeing was the Galra hangar where he’d found the Red Lion, but he was looking down on it, as if he was in Red—no, as if he _was_ Red.

Red had shared thoughts before, feelings and phrases, but this was the first time she’d ever shown Keith a memory.

The hangar looked small, from up here. The gray walls and floor that had seemed enormous to Keith at the time were tiny now. Tinier still was the humanoid figure wearing Paladin’s armor that burst into the room.

Keith froze, for a moment, as Red zoomed in on this strange new person, walking ever-closer. He could feel Red’s curiosity about this unfamiliar alien in Paladin armor whose soul was so close to her own, but his own mind was overwhelmed with seeing his face—his _human_ face.

But bittersweet, aching longing for the past was pushed aside by Red’s thoughts.

This wouldn’t be the first time the Galra had tried to trick her into taking a Paladin, forcing her to bond so that they could use her as a weapon against innocents. She’d never been fooled, yet, and she wasn’t going to let her guard down now, no matter how lonely she was, no matter how much she wished that this were her Paladin, no matter how much she wanted him to be hers.

 _It’s a strange thing to be wanted like that_ , Keith thought. It burned at his chest in an unfamiliar way, feeling Red think like that about him. He hadn’t had family in years, had forgotten what it was like. Was this that feeling?

The Galra had sent some of their own in, before. They’d never looked like this, or worn Paladin armor, but Red had to be sure. She scanned the newcomer as he walked up to her, checking his DNA against her databases. Much of it was unfamiliar, a species not in her library, but the Galra DNA was unmistakable. The Empire had been growing increasingly desperate over the last several quintants—was this their latest attempt to trick her?

So she did not let down her shields when he asked.

The figure in Paladin armor grew desperate quickly, though he did not turn to attacking her shields outright as those the Empire had sent before had done. He struck down the Sentries that tried to attack him. Some of the others had done that too. Those the Galra had forced in at gunpoint usually perished, and those who had volunteered for the task took them out easily. This one fought with more passion than the trained Galra soldiers who had come before, but was better-equipped than the prisoners sent before. Red felt like crying out at the sight of the Red Bayard, unseen for hundreds of years.

And then . . .

He opened the airlock, sweeping the sentries into space. It was a clever move, but a dangerous one, and he was swept out into space only moments after the sentries.

That selflessness, that sacrifice for another’s sake (Red’s, in this case) – that was not a trait of the Galra Empire. That was not the way they trained their soldiers.

He might be Galra, at least partially, but the Empire had not sent him.

In an instant, Red was leaping out into space to follow the Paladin, scooping him up safely in her mouth before he could become lost in the endless void of space. He was her rightful Paladin, she could tell, and she would protect him.

Keith flinched back as Red returned him to reality, trying to readjust to a body that had felt foreign even before seeing through his Lion’s eyes.

“You knew?” he asked. “You knew I was Galra, this whole time?”

Red purred in agreement.

“And you still trusted me . . .” Keith said, still having trouble believing it. Red had known almost _nothing_ about him, except that he was Galra, and she’d still trusted him. She’d been kept as the Galra’s prisoner for countless centuries, and she had still been willing to take the risk of having him as her Paladin.

No, she hadn’t even thought he was a risk at all. The empire was, and their soldiers, but not Keith.

Keith was surprised to feel the tears dripping down his cheeks, because for the first time in weeks, he wasn’t feeling worried, or devastated, or scared. He was relieved. Relieved that Red had trusted him, that at least one person in his life had been able to trust him, knowing he was Galra, despite all the Galra had done to her.

Did that mean . . . was it possible, then, for the others to do the same?

It was a question Keith was too terrified to ask, but the Red Lion answered anyway, lowering the ramp as the others burst into the hangar.


	16. Reassurance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rest of the Voltron team finds Keith.

“Keith!” Lance was the first one to arrive, and he practically flew up the ramp on his way. “What the heck were you thinking? Saying you’re not a Paladin anymore and then running off like that!”

He angrily swatted at Keith, who was too stunned to dodge the hit to his shoulder. Lance . . . wasn’t mad at him for being Galra? He was mad, sure, but it seemed like he was more mad about Keith leaving than he was about the idea of Keith staying, like this.

“. . . I was worried you were gonna do something stupid, hothead,” Lance muttered.

“Lance, I—“

“Keith?” And there was Hunk, cautiously entering the cockpit. He looked around for a moment before he caught sight of Keith, curled in on himself like he was trying to disappear in the pilot’s chair.

“Whoah, what happened to you?” he asked, his voice curious, but not afraid. He didn’t flinch back, but pressed forward, jostling Lance as he stepped closer to Keith.

“It’s a long story,” Keith said. Hunk, too, didn’t seem bothered by the fact Keith was Galra? Was this some sort of vivid dream? Would he be waking up in a moment, back in his room, and none of this ever happened?

But before he could think too far along that line, Hunk had swept him up into a nearly-crushing hug that startled him back into the present. When he jerked in surprise, Hunk released him.

“Sorry, man, you just looked like you really needed it,” he said.

“...thanks,” Keith said, once he could gather his mind enough. “I did.”

“Is that _Keith?_ ” Pidge asked from the doorway. “Holy quiznack, no wonder you were hiding in your room.” They crept further into the room, peeking around Hunk to get a better look.

“Oh, wow, that’s a bigger change than I realized. Did that all hurt?” they asked.

“Some of it did, but not anymore,” Keith said. Better to be honest about it now. There was no use trying to keep secrets when the biggest of them all was out already.

 “And I was an ass to you in the kitchen about it. I’m sorry, Keith.”

“It’s fine. It’s not like you _knew_ ,” Keith said.

So three of the others were here, and so far they’d been . . . nice? Sympathetic? Curious? It was a better reception than Keith would ever have imagined.

But the three who weren’t there yet—Allura, Coran, Shiro—were the ones who had the most to hold against the Galra. Keith couldn’t imagine they’d be as forgiving of this.

And of course, he could hear them on the ramp already.

Allura reached the top first and froze in place, hands over her mouth in an expression of surprise, and Keith saw tears in the corners of her eyes. He tried to duck away, to hide his face behind his hand, but Lance grabbed his hand before he could.

“Keith ...” Allura said.

“Keith? Is everything alri—“ Coran started to ask, but when he caught sight of Keith, he froze too.

Keith felt as frozen as the Alteans, waiting for the moment of shock to break and already bracing himself for the enraged outburst that would follow. But Allura did not snap at him, and Coran did not demand he leave the Lion.

“We were so worried about you, but I never thought – _this_ –“ Allura broke off, uncertain of her next words. Her eyes held sadness, but no anger.

“Keith, you should have told us. We could have helped. You didn’t need to go through this alone,” Coran said.

“Helped? Coran, I don’t think there was anything you could have done to help, unless you could have stopped this somehow.”

“We could have been there for you, Keith. I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through, all on your own,” Allura said.

“It’s my problem, not yours,” Keith muttered, ducking away from Allura’s gaze.

“Keith,” Lance said, tightening his grip on Keith’s hand. “We care about you, man. You’re a part of this team as much as anyone else is.”

Keith wanted to respond, to brush everyone else off. Didn’t they realize he was _Galra_ , the very species they were trying to save the universe from? But already, the urge was more half-hearted than anything. The others didn’t see things that way, it seemed.

And anyway, before Keith could say anything, Shiro walked up the ramp.

Keith felt the breath freeze in his lungs. Of everyone, Shiro had been the one to suffer most at the hands of the Galra. _He_ would realize why Keith was trying to leave. _He_ would make the others realize that Keith couldn’t be a Paladin of Voltron anymore.

“Did you guys find him?” Shiro asked first, before his head cleared the top of the ramp. As his eyes scanned the room, it took him a moment for him to see Keith, and when he did, he froze too. Keith felt the beginnings of tears building in his eyes. The rebuke he’d been expecting was just an instant away.

Shiro rushed forward without a word, and Keith flinched. Was Shiro going to attack him? Keith couldn’t blame him if he did.

But when Shiro’s prosthetic arm connected with Keith, it wasn’t powered with deadly energy to rip through him. It caught him in an embrace, and Shiro’s flesh arm made contact a second after.

Shiro was ... hugging him?

“Shiro, why?” Keith asked, his voice desperate and raw with unshed tears even to his own ears.

“Because you needed it,” Shiro answered, as if it was that simple.

“I’m a _Galra_. I’m the _enemy_ ,” Keith said, desperation edging into his voice. This whole experience felt as fragile as a china cup balanced on the edge of a table. He wanted to take this opportunity, wanted to believe they accepted him, but he _couldn’t_ believe that it would last. If they were going to rescind that at some point, he wanted it to be now, before he could get his hopes up, before he came to rely on them again.

“You’re _Keith_ ,” Shiro said, his tone insistent and firm. “No matter if you’re Galra or human, you’re the Red Paladin, and you’re our _friend_. We’re not going to take that away because of a change in hue.”

“It’s more than that, Shiro!” Keith said, squirming out of Shiro’s grasp as best as he could, and pushing himself up from the Red Lion’s pilot seat to stand with the others. As he’d thought, he was about as tall as Shiro now, his eyes just shy of with the patch of white hair the Galra had given him.

Shiro just raised an eyebrow, pushing Keith to continue.

“I’m taller, and my ears are weird, my teeth are falling out, and my eyes! Doesn’t it bother you, that I look like them?” Keith demanded.

“Not as much as it bothers you, I think,” Shiro said. “Keith, everything you mentioned, it’s superficial. Inside, you’re still the same person, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Keith muttered. “I don’t think I know much of anything about myself anymore.”

“Sounds like a Keith thing to say to me,” Lance offered, his tone serious in a way it rarely was.

“If you were really turning Galra mentally, wouldn’t you have tried to take over the Castle by now?” Pidge asked.

“Yeah, or taken us out one by one when you were alone with us?” Hunk offered.

“Or stolen the Red Lion to deliver to Zarkon!” Coran said.

Keith’s face paled – or at least, it felt like it did. None of those things had even _occurred_ to him. He could have hurt the team, destroyed Voltron, doomed the universe a dozen times over or more by now. But he hadn’t even thought to. Did that really mean that he was the same person? That he was safe to be around?

“As if anyone could change your mind without you fighting back, you stubborn jerk,” Lance said, breaking the tense mood as he lounged back against the Red Lion’s dashboard. Red purred in response, and even Keith had to smile a little. Lance was right, wasn’t he? He’d been fighting against that Galra mindset in others this whole time; even _if_ it had tried to invade his mind, he’d fight it tooth and nail.

But it hadn’t. His body had changed, but the only things about his mind that had were the things he’d changed himself: his hatred of himself, his fear of the others—all without a basis in reality.

Looking around the Red Lion’s cockpit, Keith could see that everyone else seemed to have their mind made up on the matter – they trusted Keith. And if these people, his team, his _family_ thought that he hadn’t changed in any way that mattered?

Who was he to disagree?

Somehow, without a word being said, the others rushed forward to join Shiro in hugging Keith. He could feel so many familiar arms around him, these people that had become his family welcoming him without question, without rebuke.

Keith couldn’t stop the tears rolling down his cheeks, but he didn’t especially care to. These were happy tears.

He was home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Sorry this is a bit late! I had my first day at my new job today and it kinda messed up the rest of my schedule. Also, I knew a lot of you were looking for that group hug, so I wanted to make sure to get one in (though I'm not sure how good it is)
> 
> 2) hoo boy, SEASON 6! I loved it! Keith's facial marking being a scar threw me a tiny bit. Some of you may have noticed I wrote it in as a facial marking similar to Krolia's as part of Keith's transformation, and I'll just be keeping it that way. Still, it's got me back in the Voltron swing. Expect a season 6 spoilery Shiro oneshot sometime in the next couple weeks, for starters. And I've now got some more ideas for a Population:1 sequel. I'll probably get to writing it at some point, but if you want to be actually seeing it in less than 2 years, let me know and i'll move its priority up above other big-scale projects (namely, a written-in-whole trollhunters fic covering all 3 seasons with a bunch of stuff i wished they'd done).  
> An incomplete list of things you can expect from the sequel: Keith getting used to his Galra transformation, including seeing the benefits it can offer. Anti-Galra racism, both well-intentioned and not. Klance. The Blade of Marmora. Emotion-influenced transformation fluctuation (thank you, season 6!). And much more, as I rewatch season 2 and maybe season 3 to find things I want to include! It would cover a lot more ground and move faster than Population: 1 did. If you're interested in reading that, please let me know in the comments section, or send me a message on tumblr (avablook)!
> 
> 3) Last but not least: Thank you so much to everyone who read this! Population: 1 took almost two years to write, and there were months that went by where it seemed no one but my friends would ever read it. Everyone's love for this fic has been so heartwarming, and I'm so glad I was able to make something so many of y'all enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! Those of you who follow me on Tumblr have probably seen me talking about this fic in the tags of some posts, but I’ve been keeping it under wraps for … a while. I started writing this back when the trailer for Season 2 came out (#throwbackthursday am I right?) but since I have a nasty habit of leaving fics WIP for years I decided to try writing the whole thing ahead of time before releasing it. That said, it’s not entirely done, but the first several chapters are and I have a great draft of the rest, so I decided not to let another season release go by without at least starting to post. I’ll try and get an update up once a week for as long as I can.  
> One little warning: this fic hints at klance near the end. It doesn’t get into full shipping territory [that’s for the sequel, if I ever get around to it] but if you really dislike the ship this probably isn’t the fic for you.  
> Please be sure to leave a comment and let me know what you think! I’ve put a lot of time into this fic so I’d really like to hear whether y’all like it or not.


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